Life After Lewinsky
With the impeachment saga ending, Correspondent Rita Braver asks what the future holds for those so intimately wrapped up in it, and offers some alternatives in her special column for CBS.com, "The Braver Line." You'll find it each week in the CBS News Sunday Morning site on CBS.com.
Fast forwarding through miles of videotape in preparation for this week's Sunday Morning cover story has us all wondering about the futures of the featured players in this year-long saga. We're not talking about President Clinton here - that will no doubt be addressed in Primary Colors, the Sequel. But, say, over the next ten years, what will become of the other men and women whose faces have become so familiar?
Will they drift off into relative obscurity, only to surface from time to time, the way Watergate star John Dean does? Will they have their own talks shows, like that other Watergate relic Gordon Liddy and Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame do?
Some ideas do come to mind. Monica Lewinsky will have her own lingerie line: Nobody's Secret. Linda Tripp will open a string of stores that sell undercover taping devices, and do television commercials urging customers to tape their friends because "I'm just like you and you're just like me." William Ginsburg will still be wondering what happened to him.
The House impeachment managers will form their own law firm, Hyde and the Seekers, and make a zillion times more money than they ever could in Congress. Charles Ruff and David Kendall will resign and become semantics scholars, traveling the world to give lectures on what is is.
Vernon Jordan will quit lawyering too, and open an employment agency. Sidney Blumenthal will refuse to go to lunch, ever, with anyone. Paula Corbin Jones will have her nose returned to its original state, in order to prove that she was never trying to get anything except justice in the first place.
And, of course, Kenneth Starr will be continuing the independent counsel investigation of former President Bill Clinton.
So many names, so many faces.
Historians will spend years trying to figure out exactly how Congress and the nation got so twisted up in such a strange and icky mess. There will be endless arguments over whether the problem was presidential lying or independent counsel zeal, whether the issues were legal or political.
And for the real people in this drama, both for those who got involved because they wanted to and those who were dragged in, moving on will not be easy.
By Rita Braver
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