Obituary: Judge John Sirica

John Joseph Sirica, lawyer, born Waterbury Connecticut 19 March 1904, Assistant US Attorney for District of Columbia 1930-34, trial lawyer Hogan & Hartson 1949-57, Judge US District Court for District of Columbia 1957-74, Chief Judge 1971-74, author of To Set the Record Straight 1979, married 1952 Lucille Camalier (one son, two daughters), died Washington DC 14 August 1992.

JOHN SIRICA was for a while, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the best-known judge in the United States.

He was born in Connecticut in 1904, son of Italian immigrant parents. His father was a barber and his mother ran a grocery store. Sirica described his life as 'an uphill fight against poverty'. After one false start at law school (because 'everything was over my head'), he obtained his law degree at Georgetown University in 1926. He then went to work as a boxer (the heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey was a close friend, and his best man at his marriage in 1952), before becoming a lawyer, a volunteer for the Republican Party, and then an assistant US attorney at the age of 26.

Sirica was an unexceptional lawyer who, as a loyal Republican in a legal system that openly promotes party partisans, duly became a judge. He was, by all accounts, an unexceptional judge, except for a habit of imposing severe sentences which earned him the nickname 'maximum John'. He was duly promoted through seniority to be Chief Judge of the Washington DC Federal Court, and in this capacity he chose to become the judge in the trial of the burglars who broke into the Democratic Party National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington on 17 June 1972. This made him a national - and international - celebrity.

What the prosecution brought to Judge Sirica's court was a group of men who had been caught in the DNC offices at night going through the files. Some of the men gave aliases and some were later revealed to be working for the Committee to Re-elect President Richard M. Nixon. Sirica set out to prove that justice in his hands was impartial. Eventually he proved that Nixon lied in a futile attempt to deny responsibility for these dirty tricksters. Through vigorous and self-righteous support of the prosecution, Sirica helped establish that the defendents worked for the White House. Then he forced the President to hand over secret tape-recordings of key White House meetings at which the cover-up of their crimes was plotted. Others in the Congress carried on the investigation and applied pressure on Nixon to resign or be thrown out, but Judge Sirica was the judge of Watergate, the greatest political scandal in 20th-century American politics.

The lengthy obituaries of Sirica in the US newspapers have had two themes: he was not a genius, nor even a fair judge, but his outrage that the executive branch was run like Mob headquarters in a gangster movie was genuine; he is also an enduring model of a citizen who, when challenged to operate the system, did so well enough to prove that the system works.

Justice was done and, with the help of the famous Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the threat to good government was exposed and expunged, But was it?

In the 20 years since Watergate, journalists have suggested new conclusions. In 1984 writer Jim Hougan interviewed people ignored by prosecutors and the Post and concluded that the senior Watergate burglars were working for the CIA. They were collecting dirt on politicians, including the Nixon leadership, with the aim of bringing down the presidency. In 1991, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin published Silent Coup: the removal of a President.

This book argued that the burglars were not looking for unspecified dirt on the Democratic Party but for a black book containing names of prostitutes and their clients. The clients included top politicians and among the women's names was that of the fiancee of the White House lawyer John Dean. Colodny and Gettlin believe that the subsequent unraveling of 'Watergate' missed the point. They describe a spy ring inside the White House set up by the military and ultimately managed by Nixon's last Chief of Staff, General Alexander Haig. They add that Bob Woodward was himself a former Navy intelligence agent whose reporting furthered the military plot.

Both theories have attracted support from Washington-watchers on the right and the left. Both theories argue that significant people in the upper echelons of the military and intelligence communities believed Nixon to be on an unacceptable course in foreign affairs, directed by the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.

A surprising number of men who held powerful jobs in the Nixon government have since declared their belief that the Rockefeller family and other wealthy Americans employed Kissinger to negotiate their own detente with the Soviets against the best interests of the US (a favourite theme of American neo-Nazis).

There are always military and intelligence people who think the politicians are leading the nation to its doom, but in those Cold War years, over-heated as they were by the disastrous Vietnam War, US intelligence agencies prepared plans to cancel elections and round up thousands of supposed left-wing dissidents and lock them in detention camps. The question asked by investigators in the two decades post-Watergate is, did the military and intelligence clique also launch a scheme to remove a President and his cabinet, and did they succeed?

There are obvious connections here to the three-decade-long battle to explain the JFK assassination, and this decade's unconstitutional schemes known as Irangate and Iraqgate - also launched and managed by military and intelligence hands. In their obsessive quest for single smoking guns the US legal, Congressional and media investigators seem unable - or unwilling - to see the work of the big guns in their own power elite.

Judge Sirica's blunt pursuit of 'the truth for the American people' uncovered some of the extraordinarily complex web of intrigue that characterised the Nixon administration, but he had no way of knowing what greater outrages lurked beneath the 'third-rate burglary' over whose trial he presided. Sirica maintained that Nixon should have been tried and, if convicted, 'I would have sent him to jail.' The revisionists say Nixon was himself a victim of the sort of dirty tricks he unleashed on the country.

(Photograph omitted)