"Dear Mr. Vice Pres."

The grammar and punctuation at times were--well, unconventional. And so were the thoughts in at least one passage of the three-page handwritten letter, dated July 15, 1960, and addressed to Richard Nixon (as "Dear Mr. Vice Pres."). Discussing Nixon's opponent for the presidency, the author wrote:

"One last thought--shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with it's 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 Socialism' and way before him it was 'benevolent monarchy.' " The signature--"Ronnie Reagan."

The letter was unearthed from a trove of Nixon's papers in a branch of the National Archives in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Last week Walter Mondale read the passage to campaign audiences to back up his charge that Reagan is guilty of "political grave robbing" when he invokes the names of such Democrats as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman--and, yes, John F. Kennedy. Presidential Spokesman Larry Speakes replied that Reagan "had been pleasantly surprised to find the difference between Kennedy the candidate and Kennedy the President."

In other respects, though, the Reagan of 1984 sounds exactly like the Reagan of 1960, when he was the host of TV's General Electric Theater. Who could figure out which of these three statements was made in 1960 and which 24 years later? "I am convinced that America is economically conservative . . . I'm sure the American people do not want the government paid services 'at any price' . . . If we start down the road to statism it leads to socialism." Answer: Reagan made the third statement last week, commenting on the 1960 letter; the first two are from the letter itself. Nixon evidently was impressed by Reagan's letter. At the top he scrawled a note to a campaign aide: "Use him [Reagan] as speaker whenever possible. He used to be a liberal!"