Publish Date: Dec. 28, 1998
Cover Story: Kenneth Starr & Bill Clinton, Men of the Year
How TIME Covered the News: Adultery in the White House. A president impeached by the House of Representatives. The Clinton-Lewinsky saga of 1998 was the high-stakes soap opera that America couldn’t get enough of. So it made perfect sense when TIME named both Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton – the prosecutor and the president – as “Men of the Year.”
“We treat our values, like our children, not equally but uniquely, and we don’t like having to choose which one we would sacrifice to save another. Which matters more, honesty or privacy? Justice or mercy? The President or the presidency? What punishment is reserved for leaders who would force such choices in the first place? Bill Clinton did something ordinary: he had an affair and lied about it. Ken Starr did something extraordinary: he took the President’s low-life behavior and called it a high crime. Clinton argued that privacy is so sacred that it included a right to lie so long as he did it very, very carefully. Starr argued that justice is so blind that once he saw a crime being committed, he had no choice but to pursue the bad guy through the Oval Office, down the hall to the private study, whatever the damage, no matter the cost. One man’s loss of control inspired the other’s, and we are no better for anything either of them did.”