From a year of infamy and heroism, TIME profiles four personalities who dominated the news of 1998, for good and for ill. Bill Clinton, a president who forced Americans to confront his evasions and equivocations; Kenneth Starr, the zealous prosecutor who provoked a constitutional crisis with his investigation of lies about sex; Hillary Clinton, the First Lady, who reasserted and reinvented herself during her family's gravest struggle, and Mark McGwire, a baseball slugger who reminded us that America still has role models.