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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."