Success Quote by Bob Woodward

Woodward’s sentence is engineered to puncture a comforting myth about Watergate: that the system, left to its own devices, self-corrects on schedule. He doesn’t romanticize “checks and balances”; he indicts the drag factor that makes those checks feel like a slow leak rather than a shutoff valve. By naming Nixon’s “lying, stonewalling and refusal to come clean,” Woodward frames delay itself as a political weapon. Time isn’t neutral here. It’s something power can hoard.

The specific intent is prosecutorial, but not in a courtroom way. Woodward is doing what his reporting always aimed to do: reduce a sprawling scandal to a single causal chain ordinary readers can track. “Failure of the system” sounds abstract until he gives it a human engine: Nixon’s strategic obstruction. The rhythm matters, too. Three verbs stack like charges, then land on the pragmatic consequence: “26 months.” That figure is less trivia than an accusation, a calendar-sized measure of how long truth can be kept in quarantine.

Subtext: institutions are only as fast as leaders allow them to be. When a president lies, the system doesn’t instantly “catch” the lie; it has to grind through courts, committees, sources, and reluctant witnesses. Woodward’s context as Watergate’s co-author gives the line extra bite: he’s not delivering hindsight morality, he’s underscoring a reporting reality. The public didn’t just learn “the truth” late; it was made late, by design.