Time Man of the Year : Ayatullah Khomeini

Time Magazine. January 7, 1980. Quarto, illustrated wrappers with a portrait of the Ayatollah, publisher’s mailing address label lower left, staple bound (a little edge worn), pp. 102, complete.

The infamous Time Man of the Year issue which featured Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini on the front cover, following his return in 1979 to Iran from exile and the populist revolution which saw him installed as the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Following the admission of the exiled Shah of Iran into the United States in October 1979, the United States Embassy in Tehran was attacked and occupied by a hostile group of Iranian college students, resulting in 52 embassy staff being held hostage for 444 days. Diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran were severed in April 1980 and have not been formally restored, the hostility between the two nations was amplified by the deep impact bombings by the United States on nuclear research facilities in Iran in June 2025 and ongoing conflict in the region.

‘Since 1927, when TIME selected Charles Lindbergh as its first Man of the Year, the basic criterion has remained the same: the distinction goes to the person or group who, as it was stated on this page in 1943, “has done the most to change the news, for better or for worse.” There have been designees very plainly in the latter category—Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939)—but selection has never necessarily connoted either the magazine’s, or the world’s, approval of the subject. Thus the editors had little difficulty naming Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, intransigent leader of the Iranian revolution, as TIME’S Man of the Year for 1979.’ – p. 3