Monica’s Overthrown in Face of War

I’ve grown accustomed to her face.

--Prof. Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady”

It took a war to dislodge Monica Lewinsky from television.

Only a few weeks ago, CNN, with yet another 24 hours to fill, assigned a reporter and camera crew to accompany Lewinsky on her British book tour. They could have danced all night with her, and nearly did.

In previous TV performances, Lewinsky was as practiced as post-cockney Eliza Doolittle. But CNN this time clung to her and her entourage continuously. The camera was in her limo and at every book signing, recording her every tic, nuance and trivial utterance as if her thoughts on Brits mattered and she had accomplished something in 25 years of life beyond servicing a foolish, philandering president and helping him nearly bring down his administration.

The autograph hounds were out. “Hang in there,” one Londoner said to CNN’s fair lady, seeing her not as an exploiter but as a victimized underdog.

On the other hand, she’s getting marketed in the morning, so get her to the camera on time.

But what a difference NATO airstrikes make. For nearly two weeks, it’s been bombs away on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that continued to preoccupy much of the media even after the president had managed to keep his job after being impeached. All of that now seems a distant memory.

Not that Lewinsky, who is as reusable by the media as JonBenet Ramsey, won’t be back. By the time this is printed, she may already have resurfaced on a TV show with spare time on its hands.

For the moment, though, viewers are in front of another set of faces--some of them new--and exchanging their scandal vocabulary for a geography lesson and hard-to-pronounce names that put an ich in every Serbian ic.

*

These major stories from the past and present share President Clinton, who last week gave an exclusive interview on “The CBS Evening News” to Dan Rather, a curious choice given that the tightly wound Rather’s newscast has a smaller audience than its competitors, and that he is the only network anchor one could imagine taking out ball bearings and snapping on camera like Capt. Queeg.

Although Rather asked a couple of impeachment-related questions, the interview was mostly about the Balkans, symbolically becoming an official segue to new faces.

Among them, of course, are the three captured U.S. soldiers whose battered visages are being rerun regularly on American TV, as is the media scramble for comments from their friends and families.

The “extraordinary mass of humanity” described by CNN last week applied not only to the refugees streaming toward other regions from Kosovo, but also to the media swarm outside the East Los Angeles home of Andrew Ramirez Sr., whose son, Staff Sgt. Andrew Ramirez, is one of the U.S. soldiers held in Yugoslavia. Although the father sent word that he would make no statement, the media wall held, and when he left his house Friday, reporters reportedly badgered him all the way to his bus stop.

His son banged up in Yugoslavia, he was getting a media walloping at home.

It’s the anguished faces of those refugees, though, that create the most indelible pictures, haunting images that future generations may look back on as a visual archive of epic inhumanity in the fading years of the 20th century.

Peering at this human wreckage, you try wearing those shoes. What was it like being awakened at night and immediately ordered from a house at gunpoint and deported? What was it like being separated from loved ones and rendered instantly indigent, homeless and nationless? You see it clearly, but can’t begin to feel it.

Nor probably can those said to have caused much of that pain.

Another relatively new face that Americans are seeing on TV, for example, is Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb whom Clinton, NATO and others accuse of orchestrating the brutal “ethnic cleansing” that witnesses are describing in news reports.

Even more visible last week was the baby face of Zeljko Raznatovic, the notorious Serbian paramilitary commander known as Arkan, long accused of operating death squads in Yugoslavia. CNN’s Brent Sadler was the first to interview him there last week. Then Anthony Mason of CBS News interviewed him from New York, as did equally overmatched Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Friday.

Denying widespread reports of Serb-committed atrocities, Arkan spoke such good English and was so forceful that he steamrolled his interviewers, who showed him astonishing deference considering how many accuse him, along with Milosevic, of being an assassin and war criminal.

*

No one in TV news has stood taller during this story, meanwhile, than CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who, given her cable network’s global penetration (she also works for CBS News), has to be the most famous foreign correspondent on the planet.

Awarded another prestigious Peabody just last week, Amanpour is more than a face with dark bangs. A very solid journalist who operates almost entirely on foreign soil, she also has become TV’s preeminent war reporter, the Ernie Pyle of her generation.

Two other faces gaining prominence via TV during this period are State Department spokesmen Ken Bacon and James Rubin, who give televised daily press briefings on the Balkans conflict in contrasting styles.

The older, droller Bacon wears the baggy, bow-tied weariness of someone aching to retire to a life of tending roses. The handsome Rubin is not only very cool, articulate and charismatic, but also extremely precise in his obfuscation: “I just can’t [answer] because I just don’t know. And it would seem at a time like this, one shouldn’t react to something when one doesn’t know.”

Rubin also happens to be Amanpour’s husband. In fact, one can envision them, once he’s liberated from government and earning his million bucks yearly as a network pundit, writing books and making commercials together (“How does this marriage survive?”) like Mary Matalin and James Carville.

But for now, they’re on television addressing death and suffering in the Balkans. Until Monica returns.