Jan Ehrlichman remembers the summer of 1973 as if it were yesterday.

Her dad, John Ehrlichman, was knee-deep in the Watergate scandal. He had recently been fired as a top adviser to President Richard Nixon, and was now testifying before the Senate’s special Watergate committee.

Ms. Ehrlichman, then a college student, and her mom would drive her dad to Capitol Hill, drop him off, and go watch the Senate hearings on TV at a friend’s house to avoid the press. Afterward, they’d go pick him up and talk about how it went.

“We didn’t really get into the muck of it all,” Ms. Ehrlichman says in an interview. “We just wanted to make sure Dad was OK.”

President Nixon was still more than a year away from resigning, but for the Ehrlichmans, this was the end of the road for their life in Washington. As soon as her father’s five days of testimony had wrapped, Ms. Ehrlichman and her parents finished packing up their house in northern Virginia, got in the car, and headed west.