John Sirica John Sirica Nicknamed "Maximum John" for his tough sentences, John Joseph Sirica rose to national prominence while presiding over the Watergate trials. Chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Sirica had earned a reputation for being unpredictable on the bench. Suspecting publicly that the defendants in the first Watergate trials weren't fully truthful, Sirica took an investigative approach, questioning witnesses and irking critics who said he overstepped his bounds. In 1973 Sirica ordered President Nixon to turn over tapes of White House conversations to special prosecutor Archibald Cox and congressional investigators. The Supreme Court upheld his ruling in July 1974, spurring Nixon's resignation in the face of impeachment. In all, 19 officials from the Nixon White House and reelection campaign were convicted. Sirica chronicled his Watergate experiences in a 1979 book, "To Set the Record Straight: The Break-In, the Tapes, the Conspirators, the Pardon." After he retired from the bench in 1986, Sirica continued to live in Washington, D.C. He died in 1992 at the age of 88. • John Sirica, Watergate Judge, Dies (August 15, 1992)			Howard Baker Robert Bork Pat Buchanan Archibald Cox Charles Colson John Dean Bob Dole J. Ehrlichman Sam Ervin H.R. Haldeman E. Howard Hunt G. Gordon Liddy Jeb Magruder James McCord John Mitchell Richard Nixon Charles Ruff Donald Segretti Earl Silbert John Sirica Hugh Sloan Maurice Stans Fred Thompson Deep Throat

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