It is the country’s periodic salvation that such people appear when they are needed, rising above themselves to do what they have to do: men and women like Tom Paine, Ulysses S. Grant, Harriet Tubman and Harry S. Truman. John Sirica’s death last week, of cardiac arrest at the age of 88, raised questions as tough as he was. Can we find such heroes again in an hour of need? Can we live up to their standards?
Until his historic moment, there wasn’t much in Sirica’s life to hint at greatness. It was another federal judge, G. Harrold Carswell, who inspired Sen. Roman Hruska’s memorable insight that mediocrities, too, should be represented on the Supreme Court, but it could as well have been Sirica. He was the son of an immigrant barber, and he once described his childhood as “an uphill fight against poverty, poverty, poverty.” He never actually got a high-school diploma or went to college; it took him three tries to get through law school, and his success at the bar came through quickness and toughness as a trial lawyer, not legal brilliance. “So Sirica’s not an intellectual. Who cares?” he said once. “The important question is whether a judge is honest, and does he have the courage of his convictions to do what is right at the moment.”
That wasn’t immediately clear, either. Sirica’s nomination to the federal bench was a reward for Republican hackwork in the Italian-American community. He earned a reputation as a careless trial judge, given to irritable outbursts and too often reversed on appeal, who liked to throw the book at convicted criminals-in the courthouse cliche, “Maximum John.” He became chief judge of the D.C. district court by seniority, and when he assigned himself the Watergate-burglary trial there were some instant suspicions among lawyers and reporters: could Sirica be counted on to contain the scandal at the lowest levels of the White House?
But those who knew him thought differently. He was an honest man, one lawyer said presciently, and “in this town that make a different, and frightening, kind of animal.” From the beginning of the Watergate trials, he used the immense power of the federal bench to take charge, throwing out strict rules of evidence, taking. over the questioning of witnesses and expressing open doubt at some testimony. He leaned on defendants with heavy provisional sentences to force their cooperation with the prosecutors. Civil libertarians were dismayed at Sirica’s heavy hand. But as he put it in his own book about Watergate, “I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by.” Whatever his flaws, he turned’ out to be more right than wrong.
When the Watergate burglar James McCord first acknowledged the cover-up, it was in a letter to Sirica-who read it aloud from the bench rather than turn it over to the Justice Department. (“Sirica is really lousing this thing up,” Attorney General Richard Kleindienst complained privately to Nixon’s man John Ehrlichman.) That led to the -Senate investigation, and in turn to the White House tapes, which Sirica tenaciously demanded and Nixon refused to hand over. The court of appeals repeatedly backed Sirica. His search for the truth, said one ruling, was “in the highest tradition of his office.”
In the end, the Supreme Court ruled that even Richard Nixon wasn’t above the law. Another first-generation Italian-American, Peter Rodino, a New Jersey congressman who had also showed no special distinction until then, led the impeachment committee that voted to bring the president to trial for his office. And Nixon resigned. If it had been up to him, Maximum John wrote, Nixon would have faced a criminal trial as well, and if a jury had convicted him, “I would have sent him to jail.”
After Watergate, he was showered with honors, adulation and invitations to the lecture circuit. He wrote his book. But he remained a defiantly old-fashioned celebrity, living out his life as a trial judge until his retirement in 1986. He had done his job, he said, and “I’m glad I did it. If I had it to do over, I would do the same, and that’s the end of it.” The word most used to describe him was “unassuming.” After one award ceremony, he lined up at a pay phone in the lobby to call his office.
Sirica was never an eloquent man. Even in his book, he offered no ringing statement of faith or principle. The closest he came to expressing the core of his belief may have been when he quoted Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Justice is a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in the circumstances confronting him.” Sirica did all of that, simply and unflinchingly, and left a lasting lesson for us all. We are going to need such people again; sooner or later, the fate of our democracy will hang on whether one of us can be John Sirica.
