For Three, Sufficient Punishment

In confinement at Maryland's Fort Holabird, John Dean got a telephone call from his attorney, Charles Shaffer. "Are you sitting down?" Shaffer asked. "No," said Dean. "Sit down." Dean did. Said Shaffer: "You're free."

Elated, but unable to reach his wife Mo in California because he had told her to keep their ever-ringing home phone off its hook, Dean began packing. He did so casually, since his fellow prisoner Jeb Stuart Magruder was near by, and Dean felt awkward about being released while Magruder remained confined. Then Magruder, too, was summoned to the telephone, and Dean got the drift of the conversation. He rushed up to Magruder. "Jeb, I got the same kind of phone call." The two men joyfully hugged each other.

He's Free. A third Holabird prisoner, Herbert Kalmbach, had been called to Washington by the Watergate special prosecutor's staff for more questioning. He was in the office of his Washington lawyer, Charles McNelis, when his Watergate attorney, James H. O'Connor, telephoned. "Is Herb there?" O'Connor asked. "He's free. I got it straight from the judge's chambers." Kalmbach picked up the phone and heard the news. His eyes filled with tears.

Thus did three of the men who were among the first to tell the truth about the Watergate cover-up learn that their prison terms had been cut short by a compassionate Judge John J. Sirica. Although they had formally applied for release earlier, Sirica had, in a sense, held them hostage until after the conspiracy trial ended. The testimony of Dean, Magruder and Kalmbach had helped convict four former officials of the Nixon Administration--John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Robert Mardian--in that trial. Former Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski believes, in fact, that the testimony of such lower-level members of the conspiracy, plus the celebrated March 21, 1973 "cancer on the presidency" tape, would have produced the convictions even without the subsequent tapes secured at the direction of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Judge Sirica refused to explain why he had freed the trio. Typically, he would only say: "I did what I thought was right. The orders will have to speak for themselves." But TIME has learned some of the factors that Sirica considered. They included his belief that the three had been sufficiently punished for their Watergate transgressions, their cooperation with prosecutors, the lack of any move by the special prosecutor's staff to oppose early release, and Kalmbach's weeping at the trial, which dramatized the personal tragedy inflicted upon those caught up in the scandal.

The judge also apparently felt that the inexperienced Dean, the naive Kalmbach and the malleable Magruder had largely been exploited by the shrewder trio of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell. Sirica, moreover, is known to favor setting an example of leniency for convicted men who cooperate in establishing the full truth of the circumstances surrounding their crimes.

The night before flying to California, Dean enjoyed a steak in an Alexandria, Va., restaurant with Peter Kinsey, a former member of Dean's staff as counsel to President Nixon. Dean served four months of his one-to four-year term for obstructing justice. Kalmbach, who completed the minimum six months of his sixto 18-month sentence, dined in Washington with his lawyers. Once Nixon's personal attorney, he had raised much of the hush money paid secretly to the original Watergate defendants. Magruder, the former deputy director of Nixon's 1972 re-election committee, who had admitted lying to various grand juries, prosecutors and at the original Watergate trial, was free after serving seven months of his ten-month to four-year term. He was reunited with his family in Bethesda, Md., where his wife Gail, in echo of a folk ballad, tied a yellow ribbon to a front-yard tree.*

Can Cope. Kalmbach and Dean caught the same flight to California, where Kalmbach remains a wealthy resident of Newport Beach, and Dean lives in Los Angeles. In the plane, Dean discussed his unique Watergate experience with TIME Correspondent Hays Gorey. Although the prison barracks at Fort Holabird are comfortable, and prisoners there can play tennis and cook their own meals, Dean found confinement psychologically destructive. "With professional criminals," he said, "incarceration is part of the overhead of doing business. They can cope." But he felt "helpless" in prison. "There's an unbelievable strain if you are independent by nature. Your wife must take care of all family problems, including your own. Your emotions become more sensitive. It's not self-pity, but I've had tears in my eyes while watching TV shows that are not particularly sad. People who haven't been there cannot perceive what it's like. Not even judges and prosecutors know what it does to a man to go to jail."

Dean conceded that prison is proper punishment for any criminal, including the nonprofessional, although he argued that "the pain of disgrace is one of the most severe any man can go through." But he thought that "equitable sentencing" ought to be a post-Watergate goal of the judicial system. "Take Dick Kleindienst," he said, referring to the former Attorney General. "He made a successful plea bargain, received a tap on the back. Yet he lied to a Senate committee when he was chief law-enforcement officer of the U.S. Dwight Chapin [a former Nixon aide], on the other hand, was scared, unfamiliar with the law, but he faces ten to 30 months for two far less important lies [about the "dirty campaign tricks" of a Nixon hired hand]. I'm happy for Kleindienst, sad for Chapin."

As for his former bosses, Ehrlichman and Haldeman, Dean said he thought "they have convinced themselves that they are innocent. It appears they will devote the rest of their lives to trying to prove it. I hope for the best for them, but I wish there were some vehicle for them to tell the judge what happened, instead of just continuing to deny the overwhelming evidence." Dean argued that Haldeman's attorney, John J. Wilson, was wrong in referring to Dean and other young witnesses as "pretending to be cleansed." Said Dean: "I hope Wilson doesn't really believe that about 'pretending.' Telling the truth is an extremely cleansing, happy way to live." As to what kind of sentences the newly convicted conspirators should get, Dean declared that "no one is less qualified than I am to say."

Wiser Men. But why had the Nixon men become so corrupt? "No individual" was to blame, said Dean. "No particular atmosphere." Instead, he blamed "power," explaining: "Ever since F.D.R., presidential power had been expanding. We took the next step. Wiser men in the ways of Washington might not have let this power go to their heads, including young men such as myself. We were corrupted in taking advantage of power. I know some people think I'm too charitable in taking this view."

Dean said that he intends to lay out fully his own experience in an upcoming book. He will "hold back nothing," he added. "There will be chapters my mother will not enjoy reading. My son may be surprised at my admitting certain things. I was capable of doing wrong, and I did wrong. I can only try to right the wrong. I certainly cannot be proud of the actions that brought me into Judge Sirica's courtroom. I have done my best to serve the processes of justice in the only way I knew how."

Dean objected to Watergate Burglar G. Gordon Liddy's comparing him to Judas in a CBS-TV interview. "Judas did not forewarn Christ," Dean noted. "But if I am Judas, I don't regret turning from the religion I turned from."

But what about Nixon? "Only the worst Nixon-hater would want to see him in jail. People say he went scot free. He didn't go scot free. I would hope to have an opportunity to talk to him about this some day. I can't say he would see me, but I'd tell him what, as a young man, I've experienced. For one thing, how I've become immune to attacks. Magruder, Segretti, Krogh and others, we've done wrong. We've admitted it. We're no longer burdened by it. Nixon can achieve the same. If so, in a relatively few years the ugly side of the Nixon Administration will begin to roll back. If not, the good will be obscured. The feeling of retribution will linger."

At San Clemente, Nixon last week spent what his still-ardent defender, Rabbi Baruch Korff, termed "a quiet, meditative, prayerful, reflective" 62nd birthday. The rabbi, who spoke to reporters in a thinly veiled effort to help raise money to meet Nixon's continuing legal expenses, said Nixon was pleased by the release of his accusers. "That is very good, to ease the burden of man in time of trouble," Korff quoted Nixon as saying. Korff said that the fund drive he heads has raised $95,000 for Nixon's costs, but it needs another $15,000 to meet a mid-January deadline for the next payment. Nixon is reading biographies of George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt, Korff said, as he prepares to write his own. But he tires easily, can only read 20 minutes at a time, has no appetite, and "I have never seen him so.thin."

Korff implied that Nixon would not be likely to confess any criminal activity. Privately, Nixon has admitted to him only what he has conceded publicly: he made "errors in judgment" on Watergate. On the contrary, according to Korff, Nixon feels that he had been "too yielding and perhaps at times too compassionate"--presumably about the involvement of his aides--during the scandal. From the perspective of Dean, Magruder and Kalmbach, however, that would not seem to be a realistic appraisal of Nixon's Watergate role.

* Key lines from Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree: "I'm comin' home, I've done my time; now I've got to know what is and isn't mine. If you still want me, tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree."

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