Renata Adler - After the Tall Timber

During his three years at the Fifth Street criminal office, Sirica lost thirteen of fourteen felony cases assigned him by the court. The first case he was allowed to handle involved a “violation of the prohibition laws.” He lost. In 1930, however, Sirica was appointed (on what professional basis is unclear) to the U.S. Attorney’s office — whose major responsibilities, in those years, included prosecutions under the Volstead Act. Sirica says he got “valuable trial experience” as Assistant U.S. Attorney, but he mentions no specific prosecutions, certainly none of bootleggers, or of promoters of professional boxing. In fact, he devotes only a single sentence to the whole four years.

In December 1933, Prohibition was repealed. Within two weeks, Sirica resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s office, “to start my own practice.” The practice was not a success. He entered what he calls “my starvation period,” from 1934 to 1949, fifteen years , when he says, “I really lived from hand to mouth,” it “seemed the phone never rang,” and “I nearly had to quit the law altogether.” He lived in his parents’ house in Washington, and “without that free lodging I would have gone under.”

Sirica traveled, in those years, not just to Miami but to “New York for weekends,” to visit Jack Dempsey, whom he met in 1934. He does not explain how he paid for these travels. He says he earned a fee by “successfully defending Walter Winchell against a defamation case.” What? Walter Winchell? Who brought the case? He does not say. The case he means, at least according to his obituary in The New York Times , was brought by Eleanor (Cissy) Patterson, the Chicago publisher. But that didn’t sound quite right. I looked it up. It turned out that Cissy Patterson was in fact the owner of the Times-Herald , which published Winchell’s column. The lawsuit was part of a long feud between them. Cissy Patterson dropped the case. Sirica may have played some part in the defense; but Winchell’s attorney of record was Morris Ernst.

According to Sirica, this period, “when I nearly had to quit the law altogether,” lasted “essentially until 1949, when I joined the firm of Hogan & Hartson.” He was not a success there either. On April 2, 1957 (again, it is unclear on what professional basis), he became a federal judge. By 1970, he had become the most reversed federal judge in Washington.

In 1971, on the basis of seniority, he became chief judge of the circuit. In June of 1972, he read about the Watergate break-in and assigned himself the first of the Watergate cases. He ultimately tried the cases of both the break-in and the cover-up, with the results we know. Or thought we knew.

But wait a minute. To return for just a moment to 1930, and Sirica’s situation at the time of his improbable appointment to the U.S. Attorney’s office. In 1930, Sirica writes.

my parents had moved back to Washington from Florida. My dad was barbering again and his financial situation had improved somewhat. He had managed to buy a little house on Fourteenth Street, N.W., and I lived there during my years in the U.S. attorney’s office.

The years of Fred Sirica’s apparently constant business failures, and Sirica’s own inability to find a job, had not been Depression years — only, beginning in 1920 throughout the country (three years earlier, in 1917, in Washington, D.C.), years of Prohibition. The 1930s, however, were Depression years — yet the “financial situation” of Sirica’s father, “barbering again,” had “improved somewhat,” to the degree in fact that “he had managed to buy a little house on Fourteenth Street.”

Not such a little house. According to the Washington City Directory, the house at 6217 Fourteenth Street, N.W., was large enough so that both John J. Sirica and his brother, Andrew, had apartments there. The place where his father was “barbering again” (called, according to the directory, the Empire Barbershop) at 523 Ninth Street, N.W., was not small either. It held fourteen chairs. The reason Fred Sirica and his wife traveled so often to Miami was that they spent part of their winters there. The Siricas were buying property in Miami. Hard to account for, in the heart of the Depression, even with fourteen chairs, on the proceeds of haircuts at 25 cents per customer.

According to William Emmons, Jr., the son of Fred Sirica’s partner in the Empire Barbershop, the barbers were salesmen, selling liquor to customers who could afford it. Packages were stored in both the backroom and the basement. Fred Sirica himself handled the whiskey, splitting the proceeds with his partner, William E. Emmons, Sr. Sirica, living in his father’s house and working in the U.S. Attorney’s office, can hardly have been entirely unaware of his father’s business. Ninth Street in the 1930s had five motion picture houses within a block and a half of the barbershop. The Gayety Theater was only three doors away. There was bookmaking in the back of the shoe store at 519 Ninth Street. The whole neighborhood, in other words, was not so far removed, in its look and its patronage, from the poolroom that had so seriously disillusioned the impecunious barber and his son the law student more than ten years before. Nowhere in his autobiography, To Set the Record Straight , does the author so much as mention the name of the barbershop or the address of the “little house” on Fourteenth Street. Both can be found under “Sirica, Fred” (and also under “Sirica, John J. atty” and “Emmons, William E.”) in the city directory for at least the years 1930 to 1934. There were no embarrassing misunderstandings, as there had been at the time of the poolhall, at any police station. According to Emmons, the police of the First Precinct were paid off — and there was whatever protection was implied by a son who had become an assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Even 1934, when one thinks about it, was not just the year when Prohibition ended, and Sirica quit the U.S. Attorney’s office — and Congress at last legalized professional boxing in Washington. It was also a year deep in the Depression, a particularly odd time for a young lawyer to leave a government job and start his own practice. It was the year as well when Sirica says he met Dempsey, and when he tried to start and promote a boxing arena with a “local prizefighter,” Goldie Ahearne. It goes by now almost without saying that Goldie Ahearne could not, any more than Sirica himself, legally have been a “local prizefighter” before 1934.

There are countless peculiarities in Sirica’s story. His professions of patriotism, for example, coupled with his lack of military service, in any capacity whatever, in World War II. He was, after all, a bachelor. The whole war took place during what he called his “starvation period.” The Times , in its unusually fulsome obituary of August 15, 1992, which described Sirica as “indisputably … a hero,” “a great scholar” (and “by seemingly unanimous agreement, an honest man”), particularly stressed that he was “patriotic,” “unabashedly patriotic,” and added to its repeated characterizations of Sirica as “an authentic American hero” a military component.

In World War II, he tried to get a Navy commission, but failed for physical reasons…. So, during much of the war, he toured the country with Mr. Dempsey on bond-selling drives.

The “for physical reasons,” at least on the basis of To Set the Record Straight , seems unlikely, considering Sirica’s account of his superb physical condition — and of course there are other capacities in which a bachelor, sitting idly in his office “waiting for the phone to ring,” might serve in the military. In his book, Sirica never so much as mentions the possibility of military service. But the Times ’s claim that “during much of the war, he toured the country with Mr. Dempsey on bond-selling drives” is beyond description. Here is the relevant passage from To Set the Record Straight :