Renata Adler - After the Tall Timber

Harper’s Magazine

August 2000

AFTERWORD

When I first wrote this piece, many journalists seemed to go more or less berserk. Without realizing it, they conceded that every word of my original sentence about Judge Sirica had been borne out. The ground, however, had shifted. The criticism now was that Sirica’s dishonesty, incompetence, connections, and ties were not sufficiently grave, or sufficiently recent, or sufficiently “hot” to justify my having referred, however briefly, to them. There seemed no doubt, however, that if the Times itself had discovered any element of the story, especially the reference to Sirica’s closeness to Senator Joseph McCarthy, it would have treated each element as a major scoop. Instead, the Times ran two more pieces, raising the total to ten, before my Harper’s piece even hit the stands. One, by Alex Kuzscinsky, was the only one of the ten that could not have served as an example of execrable work in any sophomore journalism class. Another, by Martin Arnold, cited in my Introduction, assured readers that there was nothing in the Harper’s piece; Martin deplored what was apparently his impression, that neither books nor magazines could meet the checking standards of newspapers like the Times . Ms. Barringer said, in an interview, that nothing I said about Judge Sirica could not be said equally about the heavyweight champion Joe Louis — which would be true, I suppose, if Joe Louis had ever fought, under fictional names, in districts where boxing was illegal, or if he had organized and promoted boxing, and served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in a district where his father ran an illegal liquor business, and so forth.

What seemed most to infuriate those journalists who reacted angrily was that I had based my passage mainly on evidence in Sirica’s own book. I should, apparently, have claimed an “anonymous source.” As it happens, I did have other sources, and other facts, which I would have thought Judge Sirica, or at least his co-author, John F. Stacks of Time , would have thought worthy of inclusion, and which the Times and its acolytes might have found with a modicum of research. In 1927, in Chicago, for example, John J. Sirica himself (not his father) was indicted, along with several co-conspirators, for fixing a prizefight and for income tax evasion. The indictments were sealed. The case never went to trial.

In his fine biography of Jack Dempsey, Roger Kahn writes that, in looking at a video of the second Dempsey-Tunney fight, with its famous “long count,” “I am looking at a crooked referee.” Perhaps. Perhaps not, or not just the referee. Kahn, like most other experts on boxing history, writes that Al Capone was very eager to back Dempsey in that fight but that Dempsey, man of honor that he was, firmly rebuffed him. Something seems amiss in the underlying logic of this story. Mob bosses approach fighters and (as in the Black Sox scandal, which also took place in Chicago) baseball players not to win matches but to lose them. Winning is what the fighters, or the players, want naturally to do, when they are not bribed to do otherwise. Dempsey, of course, did lose. The fight-fixing for which Sirica and others were named in the sealed indictment of 1927 was the Dempsey-Tunney fight. (No referee is mentioned in the sealed indictment.) My source for the information about Sirica’s inclusion in the indictment (for fight-fixing and consequent tax evasion) was the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS — which published its own historical study for internal use.

In my Harper’s piece, I confined myself to matters that virtually sprang off the page of Sirica’s own autobiography, the book I chose not to review. It was not my intention to address anything more sensational than the literal meaning of a few words on page 125 of my own book. Suddenly, these heroic defenders of reputation (not the reputation, perhaps, of a single scientist, like Wen Ho Lee, in solitary and in shackles, on the basis largely of their institution’s coverage) emerged, one after another, as though there were an honor roll: ten within the Times alone, to be followed by hundreds more. It was as though the press, self-important and self-righteous as it is, seems entirely unconscious of its own weight against any single, let alone dissenting, individual, or of its own role in the events it claims to cover. I thought this a more interesting and more important subject, than the details of Sirica’s status. In view of the astonishing aftermath of the piece itself, however, just for the record, a bit more about what any genuine biography of Judge Sirica would include.

Though Sirica describes Dempsey, at least after 1934, as “my best friend,” and although Dempsey, far more openly than Sirica, managed to avoid military service (after World War I, Dempsey was actually indicted and tried for draft evasion), there is, oddly, no mention of Sirica in the index of any Dempsey biography. Or for that matter, in the index of any biography of Senator Joseph McCarthy, or of Walter Winchell — at least two of whom, it may be remembered, had their own involvements with organized crime: Dempsey with Capone, and Winchell of course with Louis Lepke and Frank Costello.

By “organized crime,” incidentally, I never for a moment meant the Sicilian Mafia. The interests in question were for the most part Jewish and even Irish. I did leave out one Italian connection: Al Capone. That connection was Neapolitan. Al Capone’s father, Gabriel, had immigrated from Castellammare di Stabia, in the Bay of Naples, where he had learned his trade. Like Fred Sirica, who emigrated from San Valentino Torio (also in the Bay of Naples, a few kilometers from Castellammare di Stabia) Gabriel Capone was a barber. The two men were friends.

I leave aside any number of utterly incomprehensible omissions from Sirica’s autobiography. Senator Hiram Bingham, of Connecticut, for example, is introduced to Sirica by “a cousin,” who “happened to be active in local politics in Waterbury,” so that Bingham will “endorse” Sirica for the job of Assistant U.S. Attorney. It is not surprising that we hear no more about the “cousin.” Hiram Bingham, however, not only was one of the very few senators ever to incur a vote of censure by the full Senate (in 1929, for putting a lobbyist on the Senate payroll as his clerk). He also had been educated at Groton, Yale, Berkeley, and Harvard; served as lieutenant governor and then governor of Connecticut; written more than a dozen books, and, as a distinguished scholar and explorer, actually discovered the ruins of Machu Picchu. That Hiram Bingham.

Some readers seemed bewildered by what I could have meant, in the piece, by “totalitarian.” They seemed to think that it meant “totalizing” or something. What I meant by a totalitarian reaction to a piece of writing was this: not debate (particularly not “the free, robust, and wide-open debate” envisioned by the First Amendment); not even invective, or mockery, or expressions of rage, scorn, indignation, disdain, or argument of any sort. But advocacy of retraction, eradication, silencing . Not “I disagree with what you say,” but “I will attack to the death your right to say it, as well as the forum (book publisher, magazine) in which your work appears.” Eradicate, in other words, not just a book or a piece but, if possible, the author and eliminate future outlets for this heresy. This view of what writing is, and the appropriate response to it, is nothing if not totalitarian.

Supposing, however, just supposing, what was not the case: that I had been mistaken. That Sirica had been brilliantly competent on the bench and in his conduct of the case, that he had never so much as heard of Senator Joseph McCarthy or of any form of organized crime, that his book and his life had been models of rectitude and forthrightness. What then? Nowhere, in any of the Times attacks, was there the slightest indication that my reputation did not rest entirely on this single sentence on page 125 of my sixth book. If they had misspelled Sirica’s name, of course, or mine, they would have felt bound in fairness to run an Editor’s Note or a Correction.