The Making of a Tough Judge

John Sirica does not readily fit the heroic mold. He speaks softly and in inelegant phrases studded with "Ya know what I mean" and "You know me." The judicial sternness of his photographs gives way in person to an unpretentious openness, conveying his wonder at all the attention he is receiving. Belying his tough-guy reputation, Sirica (pronounced Suh-rick-uh) has been known to get butterflies in his stomach when he has peeked into his courtroom and seen it jammed for a Watergate-related hearing. He carefully writes down and reads most pronouncements from the bench, not trusting his own instant phrasing.

Yet, like his exaggerated reputation as "Maximum John" (for his tough sentencing), his simplicity and folksiness are also deceptive. "Underneath that quiet surface, he's aggressive; he knows what he wants to do and he does it," notes a Sirica colleague, Federal Judge Leonard Walsh. What Sirica wants to do is battle for whatever he thinks is right. "I came up rough-and-tumble, never backing away from a fight. It does something good for you," he says.

That combative instinct, which enabled Sirica to rise to his greatest courtroom challenge, has marked much of his career. Combined with a handy temper, it has also led him to be reversed on appeal more often than most judges on the average, and has brought protests from civil libertarians. Late in 1972, for example, he jailed the Los Angeles Times's Washington bureau chief, John Lawrence, for contempt of court when the newsman failed to produce tape recordings of a Watergate-related interview (the appeals court promptly freed Lawrence). Although sensitive about criticism, Sirica reacts typically by fighting back. "A reversal record doesn't mean that they're right and you're wrong," he objects. "It just means they've got the last word on you."

Sirica sorely needed that feisty drive to get where he is. His father, an Italian immigrant who grew up near Waterbury, Conn., worked as a barber at $15 a week while Sirica's mother ran a grocery store, and the family (including John's brother Andrew) lived in a single room at the back. Afflicted with a tubercular cough, the father was warned by his doctor to seek a warmer climate, setting the Siricas off on a gypsy existence that took them to Ohio, Florida, Louisiana, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and California. "It was an uphill fight against poverty, poverty, poverty," Sirica recalls.

To help out, Sirica greased cars ("In those days, I wanted to be an auto mechanic") and sold newspapers. He took up boxing at Washington's Knights of Columbus gym and the Y.M.C.A. He graduated from Columbia Preparatory School and directly entered George Washington University Law School, "but I couldn't understand anything they were talking about so I quit." He worked at a newsstand for a year, then tried Georgetown University Law School, but the Latin legal terminology threw him, and he once more withdrew to sell newspapers. After his itinerant family returned to the road, Sirica decided that "unless I got an education, this kind of life would stick with me forever." He enrolled once again at Georgetown, and this time stuck with it.

Sirica worked three nights a week at $100 per month as a boxing coach at the K. of C. while studying law, got his degree in 1926, and then joined his family in Miami. There he became the top sparring partner of Jack Britton, who was working to regain the world welterweight championship. Fighting at 148 lbs., Sirica won a ten-round semifinal match in Miami, leading a local newspaper to head line him as a "Great Little Mitt Artist." Sirica fought a few other local "smoker" matches but quit boxing after his mother "raised all kinds of hell with me." She thought that he ought to be using his law degree.

Sirica returned to Washington later the same year and hung out around the courtrooms, waiting for judges to ask him to take on indigent defendants without pay, just for the experience. In the late 1920s he sat through some of the trials related to the Teapot Dome scandals, fascinated by the courtroom skills of such lawyers as Frank J. Hogan and William E. Leahy: "Perhaps the greatest trial lawyers of this century." He never imagined, of course, that he would one day preside over proceedings in an even worse scandal.

In 1930, Sirica finally landed a job as a prosecutor on the staff of a Herbert Hoover-appointed U.S. Attorney in Washington. He developed a reputation as a fair but somewhat excitable courtroom lawyer. Aroused by the tactics of opposing counsel in one trial, Sirica impulsively shouted: "It ain't fair; it ain't fair!" In another case, he jumped up to protest to a judge: "Not a single objection of mine so far has been upheld by the court." When one defendant made a threatening move toward him, Boxer Sirica, ready for a fight, told a restraining lawyer: "Let him go; let him go."

There were hard times again for Sirica when Roosevelt became President and appointed a Democratic U.S. Attorney who brought in his own staff. Sirica and a partner went into private practice in Washington, renting a three-room office at $30 a room and paying a secretary $10 a week to answer the phone, ("That was the right salary because the phone didn't ring very often.") Sirica's independence was demonstrated in 1944 when Democratic Congressmen selected him, although he is a Republican, as chief counsel for an investigation of the Federal Communications Commission. Sirica quickly sensed that the committee intended to bury rather than expose a budding scandal. He therefore resigned, declaring, "I don't want it on my conscience that anyone can say John Sirica is a party to a whitewash."

In 1949, Sirica joined one of Washington's major conservative law firms, Hogan & Hartson, quickly becoming its best trial lawyer. "He was not an especially learned attorney," recalls one partner. "But he won a lot of cases he shouldn't have because of his sincere manner." In 1952, at the age of 47, Sirica, long accustomed to a livery bachelorhood, married Lucile Camalier, 28. His best man was a lifelong friend from his boxing days, Jack Dempsey. Lucy promptly offered some career-saving advice, urging him to turn down an offer by Joseph McCarthy to become majority counsel for the Wisconsin Senator's rampaging Government Operations Committee. Otherwise, Sirica admits, he would have accepted. "I really liked Joe McCarthy, although we didn't always see eye to eye."

Active in Republican politics and a frequent advocate before Italian groups for such presidential candidates as Thomas Dewey, Wendell Willkie and Dwight Eisenhower, Sirica was appointed a federal judge by Eisenhower in 1957. "Hell, yes, I'm a Republican," he still says. "You can't change a fellow's feelings just because you give him a judicial robe. But when I get on the bench, then I'm nothing. Politics is out then. Then it's my duty to search for the truth."

Out of court, Sirica lives a relatively spartan existence. He regularly rises at 5 a.m. or even earlier (having gone to bed about 10 p.m.), avidly reads newspapers and newsmagazines ("I have a great respect for columnists--everybody from James Kilpatrick to Carl Rowan --they're all solid Americans") and arrives well prepared for his day's work after predawn study. A mediocre golfer who is pleased when he breaks 100, Sirica has wavy black hair, an erect bearing, and a healthy complexion that makes him appear some 15 years younger than his 69. The Siricas have three children: Jack, 20, Patricia, 17, and Eileen, 11.

To a large extent, Sirica's life is the law. In that work, he tends to favor the prosecution, and he is particularly stern with the white-collar criminal. "I don't think a person should get special treatment just because he's had advantages in life." Above all, Sirica cherishes his independence as a federal judge. "When the founding fathers wrote in the Constitution that judicial terms shall be, during good behavior, for life," he says, "wasn't that a wonderful thing? They gave us freedom to follow our conscience."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.