Daily Inspiration Quote by Bob Woodward

A line like this doesn’t just accuse Nixon of wrongdoing; it indicts the whole fantasy that Watergate was a one-off fever dream. Woodward’s “Not a season passes” is doing quiet rhetorical work: it turns scandal into climate. The cadence suggests recurrence, inevitability, a drip-feed of evidence that keeps arriving on schedule. That framing matters because it shifts the burden from “Did he do it?” to “How long can a system absorb it?”

Woodward also sidesteps the gossip economy of political scandal by choosing bureaucratic, prosecutorial language: “criminal use,” “presidential powers,” “rule of law.” The intent is to lock the story to institutions, not personalities. Nixon isn’t merely paranoid or “political”; he’s portrayed as someone who treated the presidency as a tool kit for illegality. The phrase “in fact” is a journalist’s courtroom move, signaling that this isn’t vibe or inference but accumulated record.

The subtext is about impunity. “Scorn” implies not just violations but contempt for the very idea that power should be constrained. That’s a harsher charge than corruption: it suggests a governing philosophy where legality is optional when it inconveniences authority. Contextually, Woodward is writing from inside the long afterlife of Watergate, when tapes, memos, testimonies, and later revelations kept re-litigating Nixon’s legacy. The line doubles as a warning about the presidency itself: give one person vast discretionary power, and you may spend years discovering how creatively it can be abused.