My sister and I were talking about “White House Plumbers,” the HBO series. She was shocked when I told her our dad voted for Nixon. “Are you sure?” she said.
“Yep. The second term,” I said meaningfully.
Since my dad was in every other respect a yellow dog Democrat, saying it was out of character is an understatement.
“Why would he do that?” she said. I’m not sure she believed me.
Well, I said, think about it. Catholic Poles were traditionally anti-Semitic; he once told me how worried he was about telling my grandmother I was going to marry a Jew. (Turns out all that worrying was for nothing. She said, “As long as he nice boy, who cares?” By then, most of my cousins had reproduced without benefit of marriage, so I guess she was happy it wasn’t a shotgun wedding.)
What does any of this have to do with Nixon?
When Dad was dying from pancreatic cancer, he confided to me that his vote weighed heavily on his conscience. (I think he wanted absolution before he died.)
“What made you vote for him?” I asked. Naturally, I was curious.
He said he believed what Nixon said, that he was being framed by the Jews in the media. “But I was wrong,” he said. He’d been ashamed ever since. (I can only imagine what he’d think of Trump, and how upset he would be with certain family members. I mention no names, of course!)
I told him a lot of people believed Nixon, and I let it go at that. But I finally understood why he was always so pissed off that I was loudly against the war.
Instead, what I’ll always remember is he told all of us, over and over, that there was no good reason to vote for a Republican unless you were rich.
That’s how I prefer to remember him.
