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.