DIED. John Sirica, 88, the federal judge whose insistence on learning the truth in the Watergate scandal brought down Richard Nixon's presidency; in Washington. Sirica, a Republican appointee, presided over the Watergate cases for five years, from the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters to the cover-up trials. Impatient at times with the evasiveness of the defendants, some of the most powerful men in the government, Sirica frequently took over the questioning himself, acting like a dogged prosecutor. His decision to require Nixon to turn over the incriminating tapes, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, led Nixon to resign. But Sirica, who was TIME's Man of the Year in 1973, felt that justice was ill served by that result. "He should have stood trial," Sirica wrote in his memoirs. "No matter how great his personal loss, Nixon did manage to keep himself above the law."