Read After the Tall Timber Online
Authors: RENATA ADLER
After the Tall Timber (64 page)
If this is the way Mr. Dean will enter history, then all the
Times
pieces in this peculiar episode have value.
That Sunday, April 9, there was the Week in Review section. A single sentence, in an “irritable little book published late last year,” had now become part of the news, perhaps more accurately the meta-news, of that week. The word “evidence” was entirely abandoned, replaced by “proof.” My book had “announced without proof”; “Ms. Adler told a
New York Times
reporter that she would publish proof when she pleased,” and so on. I had, of course, said nothing of the kind. In repeating what had long been a
Times
characterization of Judge Sirica as “a scrupulously honest jurist,” the piece surpassed even the op-ed page in the brevity of its identification of John Dean. It described him simply as “former Nixon counsel.” The laconic formulation was apparently designed to lend him credibility, in contrast to G. Gordon Liddy, “whom Judge Sirica sent to prison for his role in Watergate.” Under other circumstances, this might have been simply a howler. (Dean, of course, was also sentenced to prison by Judge Sirica “for his role in Watergate.” One might as readily characterize Liddy as a “former FBI agent and candidate for office in Milbrook, New York”). By now, however, these descriptions of Dean had gone beyond inadequacy. They relied upon and actively perpetuated the ignorance of readers. The
Times
, for some reason, was publishing disinformation.
I have always read the
Times
. In a day of perhaps more distinguished and exigent editing, I even worked for it. On the day Ms. Barringer’s piece appeared, I wrote a letter objecting to certain demonstrable errors. I said I hoped Ms. Barringer had made a tape of our conversation, so that my claim of inaccuracies could be verified. No dice. No acknowledgment, even, of the question of a tape. On April 6, I received a phone call from the secretary of the deputy editor of the editorial page. “They have decided not to run your letter,” she said, in a very cheery voice. They have? I said. Did they give any reason? “No. They just asked me to call and tell you they have decided not to run your letter.” April 6 was the day they ran the op-ed piece by John Dean. On April 7, Jared Stern, of the
New York Post
, ran a piece quoting from my letter—which had been given to him by Blake Fleetwood, a friend of mine and for years a reporter for the
Times
. A spokesman for the
Times
told Stern, what was plainly untrue, that my letter was still “being considered for publication.” That very afternoon, an editor called to ask whether I would like to submit another letter.
One of my adventures in this mineshaft had already been to learn that, as a matter of policy, the
Times
does not publish letters that question, or criticize in any way, the work of its reporters. Any claim of inaccuracy or unfairness must be made to the department of Corrections or the Editor’s Note. In these departments, however, the reporter, in consultation with her editor, decides the issue—which, I suppose, is why the Corrections in particular always seem to consist of rectifications of middle initials, photo captions, and remote dates in history. (In one recent week, the corrections column pointed out that the correct spelling of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s “given name” is “Madeleine, not Madeline,” and that the middle name of William D. Fugazy, “the chairman of the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations,” is “Denis,” “not Dennis.”) There
are
, as a rule, no genuine corrections. These departments are cosmetic, a pretense that the paper has any interest in whether what it has published is, in some important or for that matter unimportant way, false.
This
, I would say, raises issues, fundamentally, of ethics. So does covering up conflicts of interest: unsigned editorials by writers mentioned unfavorably in books the editorials disparage; quotations, without any acknowledgment of conflict, from “sources” whose work, whose very methods, have been attacked by the person under discussion, in the pages of the
Times
itself. So does the concealment of undeniably relevant information: the fact that Jack Sirica was not just the son of Judge Sirica but a reporter at
Newsday
, a journalist, a colleague (imagine the
Times
coming to the defense, against a single passage, of the father of anyone who was not a fellow journalist); even the omission of virtually defining facts about John Dean. And finally, the bullying, the disproportion, in publishing eight disparaging pieces (seven in nonreviewing sections) about what was after all one little book. The
Times
, clearly, was cross about something. But there are ethical issues, I think, raised even by this sort of piling on.
To turn, then, at last, to Judge Sirica. More than twenty years ago, when I read Sirica’s book, I noticed what seemed to me astonishing discrepancies and revelations. I did some research, gave the matter thought, and decided not to review the book. I was sure newspaper or magazine journalists would pick up these anomalies and write about them. By the time I published my book about
The New Yorker
, I assumed other journalists
had
found and written about them. It turned out they had not—had, it seemed, no interest in these matters, apart from the recent questioning of my right to address them, even now.
Contrary to his reputation as a hero, Sirica was in fact a corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest figure, with a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime.
There can scarcely be any question that this sentence is true. One major source for almost every element of my characterization is Sirica’s own story, as told in interviews and in his book. That Sirica had a “close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy” is not in dispute—although, as far as I know, I was the first reporter to call attention to it. Certainly no major piece, book, newspaper, or magazine article—about Sirica, or the Watergate, or Senator McCarthy for that matter—mentions the connection. Certainly not (until its recent reaction to Jack Sirica’s reaction to my book)
The New York Times
.
Sirica’s own account of the connection is as follows. In 1952,
While in Chicago, I ran into Senator Joe McCarthy. We had been friends for several years, double-dating once in a while and going to the racetrack together from time to time. I liked Joe a lot in those days . . . .
Then in 1953, Joe McCarthy offered me the job of chief counsel to his Senate subcommittee which was investigating Communist influence in government.
I must say that I found the offer very attractive . . . I wasn’t especially excited by McCarthy’s charges about Communist infiltration, but it seemed to me at the time to be an important matter that needed further examination. By the time McCarthy made his offer, I had moved over to Hogan & Hartson and was finally earning a decent living. But I was still intrigued by his proposal.
Lucy [Sirica’s wife, whom he had married the year before, at the age of forty-seven] . . . was strongly opposed, feeling that since I was now a partner in a good firm, I would be foolish to leave. Joe stopped by our apartment one evening and I told him I felt I had better stay where I was. He agreed that it would be a mistake to leave a good firm like Hogan & Hartson. He told me that since I wasn’t going to take the job, he was probably going to hire a young New York lawyer named Roy Cohn . . . . I would never have become a federal judge if I had taken that job with Joe McCarthy. I’m sure, looking back, that had I been single, I would have done so. Thank God for Lucy Camalier Sirica.
There is something almost stunningly preposterous about this story. Sirica devotes less than a page to it. The friendship between Sirica, by his own account an obscure, impoverished, unsuccessful lawyer who had, for the “several years” in question, not even managed to earn a living, and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, one of the most powerful and feared senators in Washington, makes no sense. How did they meet? What views, interests, or other friends did they have in common? How did they come to double-date? McCarthy had made his first famous speech (“I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five names known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party”), in February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. In the intervening years, he had attacked, as virtual or outright traitors, not just the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, and General George C. Marshall, but countless others, at every level of public and private life. By 1953, the McCarthy Era (what Senator Margaret Chase Smith called the “Four Horsemen of Calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear”) was already at its height. Judge Sirica’s position (“I wasn’t especially excited by McCarthy’s charges about Communist infiltration, but it seemed at the time to be an important matter that needed further examination”) is not just inherently equivocal and inane. It is also irreconcilable with the intemperate, opinionated man Sirica and his admirers have always admitted him to be. Leaving aside his lack of professional qualifications, Sirica has entirely omitted from this account any ideological basis for McCarthy’s offer of this job to him. Roy Cohn, after all, had credentials of a sort. His agenda, his methods, and his ideology were clear. In Sirica’s account, nothing—neither the politics that produced the offer nor the social circumstance that fostered the friendship—is revealed.
The rest of his story, as he describes it, and as his legend would have it, turns out to make no sense either. Born in 1904, in Waterbury, Connecticut, Sirica is the impecunious, poorly educated, and for many years unsuccessful son of Ferdinand (Fred) Sirica, an Italian-American barber, who also seems to fail at everything. Between 1910 and 1918, for example, Ferdinand takes the family “on a sad sort of odyssey, from city to city,” Dayton, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Jacksonville again.
In each place the story was the same. My father would try to earn his living with one kind of business or another. Each time he would fail. In several cities he purchased small enterprises, only to discover that the income they produced was much less than had been promised by the seller.
In 1918, “uprooted again,” they move to Washington, D.C.—where they are so poor they can hardly find a place to live. Somehow, in this “continuous uphill struggle against poverty,” Sirica manages to attend two nonparochial private high schools, Emerson Preparatory, “for a year or so,” and then Columbia Preparatory. In 1921 he enters George Washington University Law School, where, within a month, he finds himself out of his depth (“I couldn’t begin to understand what the professors were talking about”) and quits. The following year, he goes to a better law school, Georgetown University, but again, within a month, fails to understand his courses, and quits again. It is not clear why Sirica went to private schools, or what “small enterprises” his father “purchased” in all those cities, or how, having failed “each time,” his father managed to purchase
any
enterprises, let alone “one kind of business or another” at all. Sirica does not account for any of these discrepancies.
He starts boxing professionally. “I was pretty good, or at least I thought so.” As early as 1921, between his first law school and his second,
I boxed almost every day with local professional welter-weights and middleweights. I had begun boxing at local clubs in exhibition bouts with the professionals. I thoroughly enjoyed my new life as an athlete and felt I had finally found something at which I could excel.
In 1922, however, his father has another contretemps:
By this time, my father, in another of his attempts to better himself, had bought a small poolroom with two bowling alleys and a snack bar. He had spent all his savings on the business, and soon realized that he had sunk his money into a very rough place. He wasn’t making any profit to speak of and didn’t like the type of people who frequented the establishment. I used to help out in the evenings, racking up balls for the pool players and setting pins for the bowlers. But my father was again in despair. As he had so often before, he had trusted someone only to be deceived. We lived in rooms above the place. I remember Dad coming upstairs one night after closing. He poured himself a drink as the tears rolled down his face. He was again facing the fact that his hopes were being dashed.
I guess my father wanted to hold on long enough to sell the place and recover his money. But things just got worse. One evening a particularly unpleasant group came in. Many of them had been drinking, even though this was during prohibition.
I don’t think my father owned the place quite a year. He knew that a lot of gamblers and bootleggers came in, but he also knew that if he threw out all the undesirables, he’d be without enough customers to make any money at all. Men from the Government Printing Office, just down North Capitol Street, would come in from work, order a soft drink, and then mix in a little hard liquor from the pints in their pockets. The low point in that whole experience came one night when the city police, aware of the kinds of people who visited the establishment, made a search of the premises. Stashed in the men’s room, they found a small quantity of bootleg liquor, apparently left there by one of my father’s customers. The police took my dad to the police station and charged him with violation of the Volstead Act. He was not locked up, and the next day, when he appeared in police court with his lawyer, he explained that the liquor must have belonged to a customer and that he didn’t even know it was there. No charges were filed, but the incident embarrassed the whole family.
There is perhaps no need to parse this account too thoroughly. How, having in the past, as we know, “failed each time,” did he have “savings” to spend “all of,” or “money” to have “sunk” into such a place? Why does Sirica find it necessary to point out that many of this unpleasant group “had been drinking, although this was during prohibition,” when his father, just five lines before, had “poured himself a drink” (without any comment from Sirica) in his “despair” over having, “as he had so often before . . . trusted someone only to be deceived”? What was the deceit?
