ABSTRACT

What Henry Kissinger was to Nixon in foreign affairs, John Ehrlichman hoped to become in domestic affairs. In the early days of 1971, when the “State of the World” was being fashioned in the National Security Council, the State of the Union was being launched out of the Domestic Council, containing plans for what Nixon wanted to call “The New American Revolution.” In some ways, the product of Ehrlichman and others lived up to the hyperbole, adding much to the promise of the “new Federalism”: revenue sharing, government reorganization, and welfare reform were all directed toward satisfying the national conscience while returning control to the states and localities through a selective decentralization.