Politics & Power Quote by Bob Woodward

Watergate, in Woodward's framing, is both civics lesson and cautionary theater - a duality that captures why the scandal still functions as America’s favorite reference point for democratic self-correction and democratic fragility. Calling it a "model case study" is almost clinical: it positions the episode as teachable, diagrammable, the rare moment when the abstract machinery of checks and balances becomes legible to ordinary citizens. The intent is plain but pointed: Watergate wasn’t just a rogue burglary or a bad presidency; it was an x-ray of institutional power under stress, with Congress, the courts, the press, and the executive locked in a struggle over truth and authority.

Then Woodward swerves into narrative: "a morality play". That phrase carries subtext about audience complicity. Morality plays are designed to instruct through spectacle, to dramatize temptation, hubris, and punishment. Watergate becomes less a quirky historical scandal than an American genre: the fall of a leader who believed the office could outrun the law. The "sad and dramatic ending" is doing double duty - acknowledging Nixon’s personal unraveling while hinting at a more enduring melancholy: the country doesn’t exit the story purified, just chastened.

Context matters. Woodward isn’t an academic diagnosing systems from afar; he’s a reporter whose career was forged in the moment when journalism proved it could meaningfully pressure power. His line quietly defends that role while warning that the "model" only works when institutions, including the press, are willing to absorb the cost of confrontation.