Woodward on Secret Service: Time to fire someone

The journalist whose reporting helped bring down a president said Monday that someone in a top position at the Secret Service has to lose his job in the wake of a prostitution scandal rocking the agency.

"Somebody was not watching the store. When that happens in government, the people who are in charge have to step in and say, accountability, you're out," Bob Woodward said in an interview with "CBS This Morning."

Woodward, who became famous for his reporting of President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal in the 1970s, said investigators have to ask who else knew about what was going on and ask if the agency can continue to function in the wake of the revelations under its current leadership. Mark Sullivan has been the director of the agency since 2006.

At least a dozen Secret Service employees are under investigation after reports of misconduct with prostitutes in Colombia ahead of trip there by President Obama earlier this month.

He noted that Robert Gates, who served as Defense Secretary under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, fired the head of the Army after the Washington Post reported that patients were badly neglected at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington in 2007.

"So, sometimes you just have to step in and say, leadership requires accountability," he said.

Woodward also remembered Nixon aide Charles Colson, who died over the weekend.

Known as Nixon's most aggressive "hatchet man" who once said he would walk over his own grandmother to get Nixon re-elected, Colson went to prison for his attacks on Daniel Ellsberg, the analyst who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

"When Colson went to prison, he experienced, I think, a really genuine conversion and devoted himself to prisoners and prison reform. In a way you can't question because you talk to people in the prison reform movement and Chuck Colson is a god," said Woodward.

Watch Bob Woodward's complete interview in the video player above.