Politics & Power Quote by Bob Woodward

Watergate didn’t “happen” so much as it metastasized. Woodward’s line reframes the scandal as a problem of volume and inevitability: when illegality becomes routine, secrecy turns into a numbers game. With that many moving parts, someone slips, a paper trail survives, a disgruntled aide talks. The brilliance of the phrasing is its cold logic. It denies Nixon the romance of a single tragic mistake and instead paints a government operating like an overworked criminal enterprise, where exposure is not a possibility but an eventuality.

The subtext is about systems, not just sin. Woodward implies that the administration’s abuses weren’t isolated “excesses” but an ecosystem of shortcuts, dirty tricks, and coercive use of state power. “Too willing” is doing quiet work here: it suggests not merely capacity but appetite. Nixon’s presidency, in this telling, wasn’t undone by enemies or bad luck; it was undone by a governing style that treated federal agencies as instruments of personal grievance.

Context matters: Woodward is writing as the archetypal post-Vietnam, post-assassination-era reporter, documenting a moment when Americans learned that paranoia could be operationalized. The second sentence sharpens the moral indictment. It’s not just that laws were broken, but that the authority of the state was bent toward vendetta. That’s the deeper scandal: when government becomes a weapon for “settling scores,” democracy isn’t merely embarrassed; it’s endangered.