Photo: AP

On Christmas Eve, 1974, John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon, was sitting in Fort Holabird prison in Baltimore, Maryland, talking to a Mafia guy.

“Let me ask you something, if you don’t mind. You look a little bit wet behind the ears to be the President’s lawyer. How’d you get there so young? Your old man put in the fix?”

“No,” Dean said. “I just kissed a lot of ass, Vinny. A lot of it.”

Dean’s road from the president’s counsel to prison is detailed in his book, Blind Ambition, a thorough recounting of his time and his crimes as counsel to President Richard Nixon during Watergate.

Sadly, Dean’s lessons on misplaced allegiance have been largely ignored by millions of Trump supporters. Despite the lies he tells, the questionable actions he defends, and the crude remarks he makes about others, all of this is overlooked in blind loyalty to a man whom 333 (and counting) former Republican officials, staffers, and others have publicly warned of the significant threat he poses to the country if re-elected.

How can we change this cycle of entrenched loyalty? How can we promote accountability, and create systems that reward integrity over partisanship?

Here are a few ideas worth exploring.

Promote Open and Honest Conversations: Encourage others to look at issues from different perspectives, helping them recognize alternative viewpoints and discover insights they may have missed.

Promote Critical thinking: Help individuals to examine diverse sources of information and analyze data critically. This can help them develop their own informed opinions.

Challenge Disinformation: Fact-check statements. Politifact.com, the Pulitzer Prize winning, nonprofit organization is operated by the Poynter Institute. FactCheck.org, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

Be Empathetic: Avoid personal attacks. Respect others who disagree with you. Help people understand how their emotional connection to political beliefs can often cloud their judgment, making it harder to see things clearly.

Deeply enmeshed in Watergate, John Dean clung to the familiar excuse often used to defend ethical lapses: “Everyone else was doing it.”

“There was a feeling in the White House that this was part of the game. I was not the only one who believed this. The entire senior staff was driven by this sense of loyalty. We thought we were protecting the country from another term of Democratic rule, and in our minds, that made everything else secondary. It was Nixon we had to protect—his presidency, his legacy. Nothing else mattered.”

The Watergate scandal illustrates the fragility of our democratic institutions against unchecked power. John Dean learned that safeguarding democracy requires constant vigilance. We must actively guard against corruption and authoritarianism, as complacency can erode our rights and liberties. Dean’s insights serve as a crucial call to action for those who cherish democracy.

Confronting his own reckoning, Dean ultimately came to realize that “Loyalty is important, but it must have limits. When you lose sight of right and wrong in the name of loyalty, you lose sight of yourself.”