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.