Still Paying the Price

"Let's put Watergate behind us," Richard Nixon used to plead. Five years after the break-in at Democratic national headquarters, the ordeal is still not over for Watergate's walking wounded, although some of them found their condition eased last week:

> E. (for Everette) Howard Hunt Jr. was paroled after spending 32 months in prison for helping mastermind the burglary. Uncontrite, he described Watergate as a "paranoid exploitation [of] a minor illegal act." He added: "I paid my price for Watergate in sorrow and lost, wasted years; in tragedy, ridicule and humiliation." The worst blow was the loss of his wife Dorothy, who was killed in a plane crash in 1972 while taking $10,000 in $100 bills to Chicago. Looking wan and thin, Hunt surfaced in Brookline, Mass., to consult with a booking agent about going on a lecture tour to make some money. He still owes a federal tax bill of about $130,000.

> Four of Hunt's co-conspirators --Miamians Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenic Martinez and Frank Sturgis--found another way to make money out of Watergate. They sued Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election committee for $2 million, claiming that Hunt and other Nixon associates had "completely duped" them into thinking that the break-in was made to protect national security. The committee settled the suit for $200,000, and the Miamians declared themselves vindicated.

> The U.S. Supreme Court refused without comment to hear John Ehrlichman's appeal of his conviction for engineering the White House plumbers' break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in 1971 after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers. Ehrlichman, formerly Nixon's chief domestic affairs adviser, is serving time at Safford Prison, a cluster of cement-block buildings in the Arizona desert, and could be eligible for parole in April 1979.

The only other Watergate veteran still behind bars is G. Gordon Liddy, who led the break-in with Hunt and was jailed in 1973. Still refusing to talk about the burglary, he faces four more years at the federal prison in Danbury, Conn., before he can hope for parole.

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