There was little ennobling in the broad shape of human affairs in 1973. Mankind progressed haltingly, if at all, in its tortuous quest for greater wisdom in the conduct of international relations and greater brotherhood among individuals. The U.S. continued to improve relations with China and clung to a strained detente with the Soviet Union. But political sentiments elsewhere still were expressed in the blood language of terrorist bombs and bullets, from Belfast to Madrid, Rome to Khartoum. Once more men died in battles on the hot sands of the Sinai and in the barren Golan Heights. The first freely elected Marxist leader in the world was killed in a right-wing rebellion in Chile; a changing of the guardians refurbished authoritarian rule in Greece. For Americans, the dying finally ended in the paddyfields and jungles of Viet Nam, but more than 50,000 Vietnamese killed each other after the long-awaited "peace."
Yet more than any other event, it was the multifaceted Watergate affair, the worst political scandal in U.S. history, that dominated the news in 1973. As it gradually unfolded, involving more and more areas of President Richard Nixon's Administration, it revealed a shocking disdain for both the spirit and the letter of the law at the highest levels of Government. Ultimately, not only the primacy of the rule of law on which the American system rests but the presidency of Nixon stood challenged, plunging the U.S. into a grave governmental crisis. Fittingly, it was the American legal system, which had trained so many of the malefactors caught in the Watergate web, that came to the rescue.
One judge, stubbornly and doggedly pursuing the truth in his courtroom regardless of its political implications, forced Watergate into the light of investigative day. One judge, insisting that not all the panoply of the presidency entitled Nixon to withhold material evidence from the Watergate prosecutors, brought the White House tapes and documents out of hiding. For these deeds, and as a symbol of the American judiciary's insistence on the priority of law throughout the sordid Watergate saga of 1973, TIME'S Man of the Year is Federal Judge John Joseph Sirica.
A Judicial Search for Truth and Justice
Set against the widespread abuse of Executive power exemplified by Watergate, Sirica's performance was particularly reassuring as a testimony to the integrity of the institution he represents. Of proudly humble origins and with no pretensions to legal erudition, Sirica, at 69, culminated his career only a year from retirement as chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C. He had from the outset no ambition other than to do his job in the Watergate cases: find the truth, see that justice was done.
Modest and unimposing in speech and stature out of court, the 5-ft. 6-in. jurist towered and glowered from his bench, openly indignant at what he considered evasions and deceptions in testimony before him. He simply did not believe that the seven lowly burglars who had wiretapped Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington's Watergate complex in June 1972 were a self-starting team working alone. Injudicially, some have argued, but undeniably in the higher national interest, as others would insist, he applied pressure until he got a scandal-bursting response. Once James W. McCord Jr. began to