Dear Dick

In 1960 Ronald Reagan wrote to Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon about Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy. In the letter Reagan called it as he saw it:

Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s ‘bold new imaginative program’ with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx — first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his state ‘State Socialism,’ and way before him it was relevant benevolent monarchy.

I take notice of it here because I was the archivist some 30 years ago who found the document filed among Nixon’s papers. It’s not often one finds a 3-page handwritten letter from one future president to another about a third.