My father repudiated Nixon after Watergate. Amid Jan. 6 hearings, how can supporters stick with Trump? | Opinion

“Listen to this, it’s important.”

It was the summer of 1973, and each afternoon my father would pick me up from day camp at St. Anselm’s in Brooklyn. As I climbed into the front seat of our car, he would be listening to the Senate Watergate hearings.

“Pay attention,” my father would tell me.

As we drove home, he would give me a rundown on who testified and what they had said. I turned 11 that summer and I didn’t really understand the hearings, but it was obvious they meant a great deal to my father, so that was good enough for me.

Like everyone in my family, my father was a Republican who gladly voted twice for Richard Nixon. Ours was a working-class household, part of Nixon’s so-called Silent Majority.

In fact, the first job I ever had was working for the Committee to Reelect the President in 1972. Each Sunday morning, I would place Nixon campaign fliers on car windshields in the parking lots of the many Catholic churches in my neighborhood. I would make a loop for the 9 o’clock mass, the 10 o’clock mass, the 11 o’clock mass. I was paid $5 in cash for every hundred fliers I distributed — which was good money for a 10-year-old. Based on that alone, I would have voted for Nixon.

But in the summer of ’73, I could tell something changed. As I rode home each day with my father, he was listening intently to the hearings. Sometimes, after we found a parking space, he would just sit there with the motor running because he was engrossed in the testimony. And, with each witness, he began to realize the man he loved, the man he had so often defended, had betrayed the country.

By the following summer, as the Senate moved to impeach Nixon, my father grew increasingly depressed and angry — not so much at Nixon, but himself. How could he have been so wrong about this man?

After Nixon resigned in 1974, I can remember sitting with my father at our kitchen table where he informed me that, having been thoroughly fooled by Nixon, he no longer trusted his own judgment when it came to politicians. He was done voting. He wasn’t going to run the risk of choosing another charlatan.

“You have to do better,” he told me. The fact that I wouldn’t even be eligible to vote for another six years was unimportant.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my father and those car rides, as I’ve watched each of the nine Jan. 6 committee hearings. I wish he were here today so I could talk to him about them, but he died when I was 19.

So I’m left to wonder: Are Donald Trump supporters watching the hearings with the same openness that my father listened to the Watergate hearings?

I’m afraid of what the answer would be. Untethered to facts, we have drifted so far over the double yellow line of reason in the past few years that I’m not sure if it is possible for people to take in information and honestly evaluate it. And yet that is exactly what is needed in our country right now.

“We must remember, we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation,” Congresswoman Liz Cheney said at the close of the most recent hearing.

Cheney has used the hearings to coax her fellow Republicans to look at the facts, arguing that those who clung to the Big Lie on Jan. 6, 2021, aren’t villains for believing the election was stolen. Instead, she maintained many were the victims of a president who abused their trust.

Even good people can be duped, she said.

I wish someone had told my father that 49 years ago. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been so angry and disappointed in himself.

It’s never easy to admit you were fooled. And, regrettably, there will always be those who prefer to live in an alternate reality to justify their own prejudiced or partisan beliefs. But my father was not one of them. He was wise enough to understand he couldn’t simply ignore the unwelcome truth about the president he loved.

It’s a lesson needed more than ever today.

Jim DeFede is a reporter for CBS Miami and the host of “Facing South Florida,” which airs Sunday mornings. He is a former columnist for the Miami Herald.