John Sirica

John Sirica (1904-1992), American lawyer and federal judge who presided over the Watergate trials. Sirica gained widespread admiration for his pursuit of the truth during the trials, which stemmed from the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters by Republican Party operatives. Sirica's rulings and court orders eventually forced President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) to turn over tape recordings documenting the involvement of the president and other high-ranking White House officials in the Watergate cover-up.

John Joseph Sirica was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. He received a law degree from Georgetown University in 1926 and had a private law practice until 1930, when he was appointed assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In 1934 he resumed his private law practice. In 1949 he joined the prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm of Hogan and Hartson, and was eventually named the firm's chief trial lawyer. In 1957 he was appointed as a U.S. district court judge for the District of Columbia, where he gained the label “Maximum John” for his tendency to give out long sentences.

Because of his seniority, Sirica became chief judge of the district court in 1971. When the case of the original seven Watergate defendants came before Sirica's court, he recognized the implications of the growing Watergate scandal and decided to try the case himself rather than assign it to any of the 15 judges under his supervision. Five defendants pleaded guilty in the trial and two were convicted by a jury. Soon afterward, one defendant, James McCord, wrote a letter to Sirica telling him that perjury had been committed at the trial and that high-ranking officials in the Nixon administration and reelection campaign were involved in the wiretapping and break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex.

Sirica later granted a request by Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox that President Nixon turn over as evidence nine tapes of conversations that had been recorded by a secret White House taping system. Nixon refused and ordered Cox dismissed in what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Public reaction forced Nixon to appoint a new prosecutor and release the tapes in question. Sirica ruled in favor of a subsequent request by Cox's successor, Leon Jaworski, for an additional 64 tapes. Nixon again refused, and in July 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld Sirica's ruling ordering the president to turn over the tapes. The tapes provided evidence that Nixon had authorized the payment of “hush money” to Watergate defendants to prevent them from revealing the role of the White House in the matter, and that he had personally ordered a halt to investigations of the incident being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). With impeachment by the U.S. Congress imminent, Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974. In April 1996, after more than two decades of bitter court battles that continued beyond Nixon's death in 1994, attorneys for the estate of the former president agreed to begin releasing more than 3000 hours of secret Nixon White House tapes that had been kept in the National Archives and never made available to the public.

Sirica died in Washington, D.C., on August 14, 1992. He was 88 years old.