Verdict on Watergate

Federal Judge John J. Sirica once had hopes that the Watergate mystery would be solved in his courtroom. The jury, he told the defendants, "is going to wonder who, if anyone, hired you. They are going to want to know if there are other people, that is, higher-ups in the Republican Party, who are involved in this case. The question will arise, undoubtedly, what was the motive for doing what you people say you did."

The jury took only 90 minutes last week to convict the two remaining defendants (the other five had pleaded guilty). The convicted pair: James W. McCord, 53, former CIA official and security coordinator for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President; and G. Gordon Liddy, 42, finance counsel to the C.R.P. Jailed on $100,000 bond, they face, respectively, up to 45 and 35 years in prison. But if the jury did indeed wonder who told them to bug the Democratic Party headquarters, that wonder remained unsatisfied.

Government prosecutors headed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl J. Silbert pursued the case with tunnel vision. They concentrated almost exclusively on the narrow details of the entering and bugging of the Watergate offices, while avoiding any evidence suggesting a larger effort to disrupt. The trial revealed almost nothing that had not already been disclosed in the press long before.

The Government seemed intent upon proving that the conspiracy had gone no higher than Defendant Liddy, who had masterminded the entire operation in order to score points with his superiors on the Nixon committee. The lawyers for the other defendants and the defendants themselves in and out of court offered their own implausible variety of motives: E. Howard Hunt implied that he had joined the operation because he feared that a liberal Democratic President might weaken U.S. policy toward Communism (TIME, Jan. 29); McCord had joined because he believed that the bugging might intercept some nefarious plot against the Republicans planned by a left-wing group; and the four other defendants had become involved because Hunt, their former boss during the Cuban invasion, told them it was part of the fight against Communism and Cuba.

So exasperated was Judge Sirica by both prosecution and defense that he often swept aside legal proprieties, interrupting and making theatrical asides. He started by interrogating all the prospective jurors himself, and during the trial he urged the lawyers to "get on with it." When Henry Rothblatt, one of the defense lawyers, offered an emotional opening statement, Sirica broke in with warnings, such as "don't let your blood pressure get up."

Sirica's overall behavior was such that defense lawyers for both McCord and Liddy announced that they would use it as a basis for appealing the verdict. That hardly chastened Sirica. As he stated during the trial, "I'm not awed by the appellate courts. Let's get that straight. All they can do is reverse me. They can't tell me how to run my case."

A lifelong Republican and a federal judge since his appointment by Eisenhower in 1957, Sirica has been the chief judge for the D.C. district court for more than two years. As such, he has the pick of the cases, and he took the Watergate trial for himself. From the beginning he established control, questioning witnesses himself, sometimes effectively, sometimes not.

As clear as that was, Sirica's interrogations were mostly unsuccessful at breaking through the opacity of the witnesses. He did, however, pry loose one enlightening piece of testimony: Hugh Sloan, the former treasurer of the C.R.P., told Sirica that the authority for the payment of $199,000 (for unspecified purposes) to Liddy by Deputy C.R.P. Director Jeb Magruder had been verified by Maurice Stans, the chief fund raiser for the C.R.P., and checked out with John Mitchell, then the committee's chairman. Sirica obtained that testimony out of the jury's hearing and later read it from the bench--thereby, according to defense counsel, giving it too much authority. At week's end Sirica defended his active trial role: "1 don't think it's our duty to sit up here like a bunch of nincompoops."

The trial is not the end of the case.

Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina announced last week his intention to conduct a special investigation beginning in March or April, picking up where Senator Edward Kennedy's Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure leaves off.

How successful Ervin will be in following up such evidence will depend in part on whether the subpoena powers granted him will be able to overcome claims of executive privilege by White House staffers. Nevertheless, his investigation could hardly fail to be more enlightening than the trial. As Judge Sirica mused wistfully, "I hope the Senate gets to the bottom of this case."

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