At Wednesday's hearing, Tripp attorneys Joseph Murtha and David Irwin managed to get the women to concede that their testimony about what Tripp said may have been influenced by news media accounts of the Starr investigation and the impeachment proceedings before Congress.
The BBC's Rome correspondent David Willey says the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is a much shier person than his predecessor, and is not at home among huge crowds.
The cast, uniformly superb, includes Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, Hal Holbrook as Lincoln adviser Preston Blair, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Todd Lincoln, David Strathairn as William Seward and James Spader as political operative W.N.