After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  The following Monday, April 3, Ms. Barringer’s piece appeared on the front page of the Business section. On Wednesday, April 5, a piece, by Eleanor Randolph but unsigned (I had mentioned Ms. Randolph unfavorably in my book), appeared as an editorial. On Thursday, April 6, there was an op-ed piece, written by, of all people, John W. Dean. On Sunday, April 9, the Times published the last (at least so far) of these pieces in its Week in Review.

  Ms. Barringer’s article was, in its way, exemplary. In my “off-handed evisceration of various literati,” she reported, not many people had noticed “Ms. Adler’s drive-by assault on the late Judge Sirica.” She deplored the lack of “any evidence” and managed to convey her conviction that none existed. Ms. Barringer’s own “sources,” on the other hand, were the following: Jack Sirica (whom she did not identify as a Newsday reporter); John F. Stacks, who co-wrote Judge Sirica’s autobiography (and who said Sirica “didn’t have the imagination to be anything but straight all his life”); “those who have read just about all books about the Watergate” and “those most steeped in Watergate lore” (whether these “those” were coextensive was not clear); two lawyers, who confirmed that “the dead cannot sue for libel”; an editor, who did not claim to know either me or anything about Sirica, who “explained” (not, for Ms. Barringer, “said”), in five paragraphs of a bizarre fantasy, what I must have said to my editor and he to me (“It is, ‘Love me, love my book.’ If that’s what she wants to say . . . it’s either do the book or don’t do it”); and Bob Woodward, coauthor of All the President’s Men, who “absolutely never heard, smelled, saw or found any suggestion” that Sirica had ever had “any connection whatever” to organized crime.

  An impressive roster, in a way. I had once, as it happened, unfavorably reviewed, on the front page of The New York Times Book Review itself, a book by Mr. Woodward, but he was certainly the most impressive of Ms. Barringer’s sources in this piece. Mr. Woodward could of course have crept into Judge Sirica’s hospital room, and elicited from him on his deathbed the same sort of “nod” he claimed to have elicited from CIA Director William Casey on his deathbed, and then claimed, as he did with Casey, that to divulge even the time of this alleged hospital visit would jeopardize his “source.” And when asked, as he was in an interview, what color pajamas the patient was wearing, he could, as he did in the instance of Casey, express a degree of outrage worthy of the threat such a question poses to the journalist’s entire vocation. That is evidently not a kind of “sourcing” that raises questions for a media correspondent at the Times.

  Ms. Barringer, in any case, did not conceal her views or quite limit her account to a single issue. “The attack on the basic honesty and decency of the judge,” she wrote, “is of a piece with the whole work.” Then came a memorable line. “What she writes and when she writes it, she said,” Ms. Barringer actually wrote, with all the severity of the bureaucrat deep in a Politburo, “is for her to decide.” Who else, I wondered, at least in our society, could possibly decide it? Her essential formulation, however, was this:

  As it stands, Ms. Adler and Simon & Schuster, a unit of Viacom, are either cheaply smearing Judge Sirica—with legal impunity—or they have evidence. But neither the publisher nor the author shows any urgency about resolving the issue, either by retracting the accusation or establishing its accuracy.

  Jack Sirica merely demanded “any evidence whatever.” Ms. Barringer wanted evidence (to her standards, presumably, and Mr. Woodward’s), with “urgency,” and “establishing accuracy.” Otherwise, in spite of that lamentable “legal impunity,” a retraction. An interesting position, from a reporting, First Amendment, or even a censorship point of view. I will return to that, and even get to the evidence about Judge Sirica. But first a bit more about conditions in the mineshaft.

  The editorial, two days later, entitled “A Question of Literary Ethics,” ran immediately below a slightly shorter piece, “Justice in Bosnia.” “In an irritable little book published late last year about The New Yorker,” it began. Why the Times would address an entire editorial to a “little book,” “irritable” or not, was not entirely clear. One might have thought that, almost thirty years after the Watergate and more than sixty years after some of the events in question, the country really does turn for its information about Judge Sirica to a passage in a book about The New Yorker magazine. “Since Judge Sirica is dead,” the editorial again pointed out, “he is unable to sue for libel.” True enough. “But that does not lift the ethical burden from Ms. Adler to support her charges with evidence that she says exists,” but “that she and her editors at Simon & Schuster, for some unfathomable reason, omitted from her book.” Then, a new standard, not just “evidence” but a cognate of “proof” crept in. “If Ms. Adler was referring to allegations about Judge Sirica’s father . . . she will need to document that unproven contention and show how it relates to the judge himself.”

  It was interesting to learn what I needed to document and show. I found it difficult, however, to see in what sense my “burden” was (as Ms. Randolph, writing anonymously for the Times, put it) “ethical”—or how the passage in my book could have raised an issue of “ethics,” “literary” or other. Professional issues, perhaps. Issues of fact, history, judgment. Ethics, no. I was either right or I wasn’t, and I either had evidence or I hadn’t. (The questions were, by no means, the same.) The Times, as it turned out, had not the slightest interest in Sirica or his history. No reporter for the Times, or as far as I know any other publication, made any effort to investigate the nature of the connection with Senator McCarthy—let alone the basis for an assertion of clear ties to organized crime. This lack of curiosity seemed to me extraordinary. The sole preoccupation was with a kind of meta-journalistic question—not what happened, but what were my sources and my obligations. As to what was, however, “for some unfathomable reason omitted,” the Times had only to look at its own op-ed piece the following day.

  That piece, entitled “A Source on Sirica?,” consisted of John Dean’s speculation about something the Times had reason to know not to be the case: that my “source” was Dean’s old enemy, and current adversary in an embittered lawsuit, G. Gordon Liddy. What was remarkable, however, was less the content of the piece than the words with which the Times identified its author. The caption, in its entirety, read as follows:

  John W. Dean, an investment banker and the author of “Blind Ambition,” was counsel to President Richard M. Nixon.

  If this is the way Mr. Dean will enter history, then all the Times pieces in this peculiar episode have value.

  That Sunday, April 9, there was the Week in Review section. A single sentence, in an “irritable little book published late last year,” had now become part of the news, perhaps more accurately the meta-news, of that week. The word “evidence” was entirely abandoned, replaced by “proof.” My book had “announced without proof”; “Ms. Adler told a New York Times reporter that she would publish proof when she pleased,” and so on. I had, of course, said nothing of the kind. In repeating what had long been a Times characterization of Judge Sirica as “a scrupulously honest jurist,” the piece surpassed even the op-ed page in the brevity of its identification of John Dean. It described him simply as “former Nixon counsel.” The laconic formulation was apparently designed to lend him credibility, in contrast to G. Gordon Liddy, “whom Judge Sirica sent to prison for his role in Watergate.” Under other circumstances, this might have been simply a howler. (Dean, of course, was also sentenced to prison by Judge Sirica “for his role in Watergate.” One might as readily characterize Liddy as a “former FBI agent and candidate for office in Milbrook, New York”). By now, however, these descriptions of Dean had gone beyond inadequacy. They relied upon and actively perpetuated the ignorance of readers. The Times, for some reason, was publishing disinformation.

  I have always read the Times. In a day of perhaps more distinguished and exigent editing, I even worked for it. On the day Ms. Barringer’s piece appeared, I wrote a lett
er objecting to certain demonstrable errors. I said I hoped Ms. Barringer had made a tape of our conversation, so that my claim of inaccuracies could be verified. No dice. No acknowledgment, even, of the question of a tape. On April 6, I received a phone call from the secretary of the deputy editor of the editorial page. “They have decided not to run your letter,” she said, in a very cheery voice. They have? I said. Did they give any reason? “No. They just asked me to call and tell you they have decided not to run your letter.” April 6 was the day they ran the op-ed piece by John Dean. On April 7, Jared Stern, of the New York Post, ran a piece quoting from my letter—which had been given to him by Blake Fleetwood, a friend of mine and for years a reporter for the Times. A spokesman for the Times told Stern, what was plainly untrue, that my letter was still “being considered for publication.” That very afternoon, an editor called to ask whether I would like to submit another letter.

  One of my adventures in this mineshaft had already been to learn that, as a matter of policy, the Times does not publish letters that question, or criticize in any way, the work of its reporters. Any claim of inaccuracy or unfairness must be made to the department of Corrections or the Editor’s Note. In these departments, however, the reporter, in consultation with her editor, decides the issue—which, I suppose, is why the Corrections in particular always seem to consist of rectifications of middle initials, photo captions, and remote dates in history. (In one recent week, the corrections column pointed out that the correct spelling of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s “given name” is “Madeleine, not Madeline,” and that the middle name of William D. Fugazy, “the chairman of the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations,” is “Denis,” “not Dennis.”) There are, as a rule, no genuine corrections. These departments are cosmetic, a pretense that the paper has any interest in whether what it has published is, in some important or for that matter unimportant way, false.

  This, I would say, raises issues, fundamentally, of ethics. So does covering up conflicts of interest: unsigned editorials by writers mentioned unfavorably in books the editorials disparage; quotations, without any acknowledgment of conflict, from “sources” whose work, whose very methods, have been attacked by the person under discussion, in the pages of the Times itself. So does the concealment of undeniably relevant information: the fact that Jack Sirica was not just the son of Judge Sirica but a reporter at Newsday, a journalist, a colleague (imagine the Times coming to the defense, against a single passage, of the father of anyone who was not a fellow journalist); even the omission of virtually defining facts about John Dean. And finally, the bullying, the disproportion, in publishing eight disparaging pieces (seven in nonreviewing sections) about what was after all one little book. The Times, clearly, was cross about something. But there are ethical issues, I think, raised even by this sort of piling on.

  To turn, then, at last, to Judge Sirica. More than twenty years ago, when I read Sirica’s book, I noticed what seemed to me astonishing discrepancies and revelations. I did some research, gave the matter thought, and decided not to review the book. I was sure newspaper or magazine journalists would pick up these anomalies and write about them. By the time I published my book about The New Yorker, I assumed other journalists had found and written about them. It turned out they had not—had, it seemed, no interest in these matters, apart from the recent questioning of my right to address them, even now.

  Contrary to his reputation as a hero, Sirica was in fact a corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest figure, with a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime.

  There can scarcely be any question that this sentence is true. One major source for almost every element of my characterization is Sirica’s own story, as told in interviews and in his book. That Sirica had a “close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy” is not in dispute—although, as far as I know, I was the first reporter to call attention to it. Certainly no major piece, book, newspaper, or magazine article—about Sirica, or the Watergate, or Senator McCarthy for that matter—mentions the connection. Certainly not (until its recent reaction to Jack Sirica’s reaction to my book) The New York Times.

  Sirica’s own account of the connection is as follows. In 1952,

  While in Chicago, I ran into Senator Joe McCarthy. We had been friends for several years, double-dating once in a while and going to the racetrack together from time to time. I liked Joe a lot in those days . . . .

  Then in 1953, Joe McCarthy offered me the job of chief counsel to his Senate subcommittee which was investigating Communist influence in government.

  I must say that I found the offer very attractive . . . I wasn’t especially excited by McCarthy’s charges about Communist infiltration, but it seemed to me at the time to be an important matter that needed further examination. By the time McCarthy made his offer, I had moved over to Hogan & Hartson and was finally earning a decent living. But I was still intrigued by his proposal.

  Lucy [Sirica’s wife, whom he had married the year before, at the age of forty-seven] . . . was strongly opposed, feeling that since I was now a partner in a good firm, I would be foolish to leave. Joe stopped by our apartment one evening and I told him I felt I had better stay where I was. He agreed that it would be a mistake to leave a good firm like Hogan & Hartson. He told me that since I wasn’t going to take the job, he was probably going to hire a young New York lawyer named Roy Cohn . . . . I would never have become a federal judge if I had taken that job with Joe McCarthy. I’m sure, looking back, that had I been single, I would have done so. Thank God for Lucy Camalier Sirica.

  There is something almost stunningly preposterous about this story. Sirica devotes less than a page to it. The friendship between Sirica, by his own account an obscure, impoverished, unsuccessful lawyer who had, for the “several years” in question, not even managed to earn a living, and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, one of the most powerful and feared senators in Washington, makes no sense. How did they meet? What views, interests, or other friends did they have in common? How did they come to double-date? McCarthy had made his first famous speech (“I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five names known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party”), in February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. In the intervening years, he had attacked, as virtual or outright traitors, not just the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, and General George C. Marshall, but countless others, at every level of public and private life. By 1953, the McCarthy Era (what Senator Margaret Chase Smith called the “Four Horsemen of Calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear”) was already at its height. Judge Sirica’s position (“I wasn’t especially excited by McCarthy’s charges about Communist infiltration, but it seemed at the time to be an important matter that needed further examination”) is not just inherently equivocal and inane. It is also irreconcilable with the intemperate, opinionated man Sirica and his admirers have always admitted him to be. Leaving aside his lack of professional qualifications, Sirica has entirely omitted from this account any ideological basis for McCarthy’s offer of this job to him. Roy Cohn, after all, had credentials of a sort. His agenda, his methods, and his ideology were clear. In Sirica’s account, nothing—neither the politics that produced the offer nor the social circumstance that fostered the friendship—is revealed.

  The rest of his story, as he describes it, and as his legend would have it, turns out to make no sense either. Born in 1904, in Waterbury, Connecticut, Sirica is the impecunious, poorly educated, and for many years unsuccessful son of Ferdinand (Fred) Sirica, an Italian-American barber, who also seems to fail at everything. Between 1910 and 1918, for example, Ferdinand takes the family “on a sad sort of odyssey, from city to city,” Dayton, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Jacksonville again.

  In each place the story was the same. My father would try to earn his living with one kind of business or another. Each time he would fail. In several cities he purchased small enterprises, only to discover that the inco
me they produced was much less than had been promised by the seller.

  In 1918, “uprooted again,” they move to Washington, D.C.—where they are so poor they can hardly find a place to live. Somehow, in this “continuous uphill struggle against poverty,” Sirica manages to attend two nonparochial private high schools, Emerson Preparatory, “for a year or so,” and then Columbia Preparatory. In 1921 he enters George Washington University Law School, where, within a month, he finds himself out of his depth (“I couldn’t begin to understand what the professors were talking about”) and quits. The following year, he goes to a better law school, Georgetown University, but again, within a month, fails to understand his courses, and quits again. It is not clear why Sirica went to private schools, or what “small enterprises” his father “purchased” in all those cities, or how, having failed “each time,” his father managed to purchase any enterprises, let alone “one kind of business or another” at all. Sirica does not account for any of these discrepancies.

  He starts boxing professionally. “I was pretty good, or at least I thought so.” As early as 1921, between his first law school and his second,

  I boxed almost every day with local professional welter-weights and middleweights. I had begun boxing at local clubs in exhibition bouts with the professionals. I thoroughly enjoyed my new life as an athlete and felt I had finally found something at which I could excel.

  In 1922, however, his father has another contretemps:

  By this time, my father, in another of his attempts to better himself, had bought a small poolroom with two bowling alleys and a snack bar. He had spent all his savings on the business, and soon realized that he had sunk his money into a very rough place. He wasn’t making any profit to speak of and didn’t like the type of people who frequented the establishment. I used to help out in the evenings, racking up balls for the pool players and setting pins for the bowlers. But my father was again in despair. As he had so often before, he had trusted someone only to be deceived. We lived in rooms above the place. I remember Dad coming upstairs one night after closing. He poured himself a drink as the tears rolled down his face. He was again facing the fact that his hopes were being dashed.