Parents were hippies / radicals.
I can't remember a time before I thought the president was a crook -- my parents hated Nixon so much. I heard a shit ton about Watergate but did not have an inkling of what it was about, but I did know it was just more of Nixon being an evil crook.
I also remember seeing Reagan on TV around 1975 -- I think he was a contestant on a game show, and my mom saying he was another crook. She also told me the Shah of Iran was terrible, so my perspective on the Iranian revolution was a little different than most kids. Not that I sided with the revolutionaries, but I recognized they'd toppled a bad man.
I jumbled up wars in my head. We had lots of books about WW II and I read about the Battle of Britain, and I knew we were at war with Vietnam, so I put two and two together and thought jetliners going overhead were Vietcong bombers. Apparently they were always on the way to some other target because I am still here to type this.
It gets more fucked up...Dad made absolutely no secret of his pot smoking. He'd light up in the car on the way to school, picking me up, whenever he felt like it at home...This in spite of the fact he was on probation for a fairly large bust in Houston, the one that forced us to move to Nashville, where he got on a more lenient form of probation. Anyway, he and his buddies would be passing one around and I'd hear something about how this was primo shit from Colombia.
Because of the cloud around dad's bust, I associated the government with cops....And then one day I asked dad what the DC in Washington DC stood for. He told me it stood for District of Columbia, and a light bulb went off. It was the capital and it was where all the cops were and all the cops cared about was busting people for weed, so they named their city after the cause they were fighting for.
They were going through a divorce at the time and most often I was at my mom's house, and she would let me stay up and watch the early seasons of SNL, so I think I knew more of Ford and Carter through Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd than I did the men themselves. Ford fell down a lot and Carter always smiled and had a drunk fatass brother.