Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Twenty-five years ago, after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Gerald Ford promised a return to normalcy. "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," President Ford declared.
But it was not. The Watergate scandal, and the remedies against future abuses of power, would have an enduring impact on presidents and the country. In Shadow, Bob Woodward takes us deep into the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton to describe how each discovered that the presidency was forever altered. With special emphasis on the human toll, Woodward shows the consequences of the new ethics laws, and the emboldened Congress and media. Powerful investigations increasingly stripped away the privacy and protections once expected by the nation's chief executive.
Shadow is an authoritative, unsettling narrative of the modern, beleaguered presidency.
"FOR YEARS, I have been struck by a scene in Richard Nixon’s memoir, RN. Just before Christmas 1967, Nixon, then only a former vice president, wrote on a legal pad: “I have decided personally against becoming a candidate.” He would not run for president. He summarized his reasons. Losing again would be, he put it, “an emotional disaster” for his family. He did not relish political combat. After years of campaigning he was tired of having to go begging for support, political and financial, even from old friends. He was bored by the charade of trying to romance the media. “Personally,” he wrote, “I have had it. I want nothing else.” By the next month, mid-January 1968, Nixon had reversed course. “I had increasingly come to understand that politics was not just an alternative occupation for me,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It was my life.” He ran and won ten months later. The politics that was Nixon’s life before he was elected president reflected the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. By the time he resigned in 1974, American politics was changed forever because of Vietnam and Watergate."