MAN OF THE YEAR: Judge John J. Sirica: Standing Firm for the Primacy of Law

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officials had been "applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent"; 2) perjury masking the motivations of the defendants had occurred during the McCord-Liddy trial; and 3) "others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, when they could have been by those testifying." After he had read the letter and watched newsmen rush for telephones, the import struck Sirica again, almost like a physical blow. He felt pains in his chest, ordered a recess in the proceedings and retired to his chambers to rest.

When McCord later detailed his charges to Government and Senate investigators, he claimed he had been told that former Attorney General John Mitchell had approved the Watergate wiretapping plans, that all the defendants had been given regular installments of payoff money to keep quiet, that he and others had been promised Executive clemency in return for their silence after serving short prison terms, and that this offer came from the White House. McCord's sources of information were Liddy and Hunt, making his own testimony hearsay and thus legally inconclusive in a criminal case. But the fact that McCord was talking broke the conspiracy of silence—and blew open the whole scandal.

Sirica then deferred sentencing McCord. But in the most controversial act in his entire handling of the Watergate affair, he also kept the pressure on the other convicted conspirators to talk too by giving them harsh provisional sentences ranging up to 40 years. He called their crimes "sordid, despicable and thoroughly reprehensible." He promised to review the sentences later and said that the final sentencing "would depend on your full cooperation with the grand jury and the Senate Select Committee. " Sirica's expressed purpose: "Some good can and should come from a revelation of sinister conduct whenever and wherever such conduct exists."

Solid evidence that the extreme sentences would not be finally imposed came when Sirica sentenced Liddy, the one conspirator who apparently intended to live up to the omerta training of a clandestine agent by stubbornly remaining silent. Liddy was given a term of from six years and eight months to 20 years. When he was granted immunity against further prosecution and recalled before the grand jury for questioning about other conspirators, he still balked—so Sirica on April 3 gave him an additional prison term for contempt of court. Frankly conceding that he was wielding a judicial club, Sirica said that the aim was "to give meaning and coercive impact to the court's contempt powers."

At a higher level, the cover-up was now crumbling. White House Counsel John Dean had warned Nixon on March 21 that "there was a cancer growing on the presidency." Dean spirited documents from his own files out of the White House, put them in a bank safe-deposit box and gave the keys to Sirica. When the White House on May 14 asked Sirica to return the Dean documents, the judge refused. He would keep the originals and give copies to new Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the Ervin committee staff.

Sirica complied with a Senate committee request by giving limited immunity against prosecution to Dean and another suddenly talkative witness, Jeb Stuart Magruder, deputy director of Nixon's re-election committee. They could