A 'Newsday' Editor Turns Over Key Nixon Watergate Letter to Duke

By: Richard Nixon's law school alma mater at Duke University was presented the original letter in which the president refused to turn over White House audio tapes that tied the Watergate coverup to the West Wing.

John J. "Jack" Sirica Jr., also a Duke alumnus--now an editor at "Newsday' in New York--presented the slightly yellowed letter to the school's law library 32 years after his father, federal Judge John Sirica, received Nixon's defiant reply. The gift was marked Monday by a ceremony involving law students and professors.

"It's a nice commemoration of a troubled presidency," said Christopher Schroeder, a law and public policy professor who recounted events before and after Nixon's July 23, 1973, letter to Sirica.

The letter written on White House stationary said Nixon would not comply with Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox's subpoena seeking taped conversations from the Oval Office.

"I must decline to obey the command of that subpoena. In doing so I follow the example of a long line of my predecessors," the letter begins.

Nixon was arguing the constitutional question of whether presidents may keep records secret from another of the three branches of government. Vice President Dick Cheney invoked the same executive privilege doctrine in 2003 when Congress sought records of his meetings with energy executives on a task force.

"The independence of the three branches of our government is at the very heart of our Constitutional system," Nixon wrote. "It would be wholly inadmissible for the President to seek to compel some particular action by the courts. It is equally inadmissible for the courts to seek to compel some particular action from the President."

Sirica rejected Nixon's argument, ruling that the executive privilege didn't apply to the tapes. The ruling was upheld on appeal and led to the revelation that Nixon knew about the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office complex by agents of his 1972 re-election campaign days after it happened.

Nixon then discussed with his aides ways to break the law and impede the investigation.

The president resigned in August 1974 rather than face expected impeachment.

"I think we owe a great deal to a federal judge who first addressed all these great constitutional questions and had the courage of his convictions to render the decisions that he thought were called for by the Constitution," Schroeder said.

The younger Sirica, now an editor at the daily newspaper Newsday in New York, said his father was often unable to sleep as he deliberated Watergate issues. The son of an itinerant barber, Judge Sirica also was mindful of gaps in his intellectual pedigree. He had been allowed to enter law school ? which he initially flunked out of ? straight out of high school, Jack Sirica said.

In the end, the judge's common-sense focus on the case as a burglary kept him on track, his son said.

Jack Sirica was living at home with his parents during part of the Watergate case after dropping out of Duke and working for a time as a copyboy at the old Washington Star. He joined his father in court occasionally, including when Watergate burglar James McCord made the bombshell revelation that he and his co-defendants had been pressured to plead guilty and keep silent.

The younger Sirica completed his undergraduate degree at Duke in 1976.

Nixon's relationship to Duke was complicated by the controversies of his political career as far back as his vice presidency under Dwight Eisenhower. Faculty members rejected awarding him an honorary degree, and an invitation to deliver Duke's commencement address in 1954 was quietly dropped.

In 1981, faculty members scuttled negotiations by Duke President Terry Sanford to put Nixon's presidential library at Duke. A portrait of him in the law school was taken down during Watergate and rehung only briefly four years after his death in 1994. It was then sent to a Washington law office.