Politics & Power Quote by Samuel Dash

Watergate’s enduring sting, Samuel Dash suggests, wasn’t just the burglary or the cover-up; it was the rare moment when the public was permitted to function as a real constitutional actor. “Allowed” is the tell. Outrage doesn’t automatically translate into accountability in a media-saturated democracy; it needs channels that make private corruption legible and politically costly. Watergate, in Dash’s telling, was unique because the system briefly stopped insulating the presidency from consequences and let ordinary citizens do what civics textbooks promise they can do: judge, demand, and punish.

Dash was no pundit. As chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, he watched the scandal become a televised civic seminar, with hearings that turned procedure into drama and evidence into narrative. That context gives his phrasing a lawyer’s precision: the public “expressing its outrage” isn’t mob emotion, it’s a verdict formed through disclosure - tapes, testimony, timelines - and delivered through institutions: Congress, courts, elections, pressure on party leadership. He frames resignation as the downstream effect of democratic participation, not just elite self-correction.

The subtext is both proud and warning. Proud, because the republic demonstrated it could discipline its highest office without tanks in the streets. Warning, because “for the first time” implies how abnormal genuine accountability is. Watergate wasn’t simply a scandal; it was a temporary alignment of investigative journalism, adversarial oversight, and a public attentive enough to make denial untenable. Dash is quietly asking whether we still have that alignment - or whether the presidency has since relearned how to avoid being “allowed” to face the people.