How Isikoff got Lewinsky scoop

It was the story of a lifetime—and he couldn’t publish it. In Newsweek’s final print issue, former staff reporter Michael Isikoff gives the inside tale of how he uncovered President Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in early 1998. Isikoff had been talking to Linda Tripp—a confidante of Lewinsky's—for months, and a source tipped him off that Tripp was cooperating with a Justice Department investigation. Isikoff and his Newsweek bosses got hold of some juicy tapes, but they just didn’t have enough time to do the reporting legwork before the weekly deadline—and the website Drudge Report ran with it days later. “I would have preferred we had it first,” Isikoff writes. “But we settled for having it better than anybody else.”