Word: sirica
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Tough sentencing earned him the nickname "Maximum John," but now Watergate Judge John Sirica, 73, has stepped down from full-time duty on the federal court to handle only civil cases, which require no sentencing. "They're calling me 'Minimum John,' " joked the jurist. Although his new status of senior judge is a form of retirement, Sirica can keep his staff if he needs them. Apparently he will: he already has 130 civil suits on his new docket...
...setting, the key characters, even the major prop were familiar. In Courtroom 2 of the federal Courts Building, where the first of the Watergate trials began more than four years ago, Judge John J. Sirica last week presided over the "last major decision I'll have to render in this long, difficult case." Having sentenced 17 Watergaters to prison terms, Sirica was ruling on petitions for leniency from the only ones who are still imprisoned-John Mitchell, H.R. (Bob) Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. At their trial, tape-recorded conversations in the Oval Office had sealed their convictions...
...three record ed their messages for visiting Probation Officer Herbert Vogt. They knew that Sirica wanted words of repentance, and they gave him just that - each in his fashion. Said Mitchell, the first U.S. Attorney General to go to prison: "My reflections since the trial upon my acts and deeds have led me to considerable remorse and regret that they occurred." He added that "no set of circumstances, whatever they might be, will ever again lead me to take such actions or to perform such deeds. I am truly sorry...
...courtroom testimony: "I'm sorry for what I've done, for what I've been responsible for, for what's been the result and the damage to many, many people and I think to our whole governmental system." In a letter that Haldeman sent to Sirica before he was sentenced last June, he wrote: "I recognize the terrible cost to the nation that this whole Watergate case has represented, and I will carry for the rest of my life the burden of knowing that I played a major role in that tragedy...
...three, only Ehrlichman came close to spelling out how he had erred. In his own letter to Sirica last June, Ehrlichman said, without ever mentioning his former boss by name: "I permitted myself to be used." Added Ehrlichman in his taped remarks: "I abdicated my moral judgments and turned them over to someone else." He spoke of "an exaggerated sense of my obligation to do as I was bidden," and warned present and future White House aides to be on the alert for "red flags" of moral dilemmas that may arise while serving a President. Finally, Ehrlichman confessed: "I wasn...