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Safire/Price 7th Draft August 7, 1969 FRIDAY DOMESTIC SPEECH - DRAFT As you know, I returned last Sunday night from a trip around the world -- a trip that took me to eight countries in nine days. The purpose of this trip was to help lay the basis for a lasting peace, once the war in Vietnam is ended. In the course of it, I also saw once again the vigorous efforts so many new nations are making to leap the centuries into the modern world. Here in the United States, we are more fortunate. We have the world's most advanced industrial economy, the greatest wealth ever known to man, and the fullest measure of freedom ever enjoyed by any people, anywhere. Yet we, too, have an urgent need to modernize our institutions -- and our need is no less than theirs. We face an urban crisis, a social crisis -- and at the same time, a crisis of confidence in the capacity of government to do its job. A third of a century of centralizing power and responsibility in Washington has produced a bureaucratic monstrosity, cumbersome, unresponsive and ineffective.