Shadow was published by Simon & Schuster in 1999. The book argues that Watergate created a permanent crisis of accountability in the American presidency — a system of independent counsels, investigative reporters, and congressional oversight that was designed to prevent another Nixon but that, in practice, made every president vulnerable to investigation and every investigation a potential constitutional crisis.
Woodward traces the post-Watergate legacy through five presidencies. Ford pardoned Nixon and was punished by the electorate, establishing the principle that mercy would be treated as complicity. Carter’s administration was investigated for the Bert Lance affair — minor compared to Watergate but treated with the same prosecutorial intensity. Reagan survived Iran-Contra through a combination of charm and deniability. George H. W. Bush was haunted by the pardon of Caspar Weinberger. Clinton was consumed by the Whitewater investigation and the Lewinsky scandal, which led to his impeachment — an outcome that vindicated Woodward’s thesis about the post-Watergate dynamic, in which every president is assumed to be hiding something and every investigation escalates until it finds a crime or is exhausted.
The book’s Clinton chapters are its most detailed and most controversial. Woodward had unprecedented access to the Clinton White House during the Lewinsky crisis, and his account of the internal deliberations — the lying, the damage control, the legal maneuvering — is devastating in its specificity.
Collecting Shadow
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1999): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20
- Signed: $40–$100