Pen Pal from Plains

The writer began with folksy chitchat, assuring his readers that both his mother and brother Billy are doing just fine, thank you. But soon he turned serious—and critical—about the man who took his job away. In a three-page letter sent to former aides and Cabinet members, Jimmy Carter broke his 5%-month silence on his successor, although he never mentioned Ronald Reagan by name. Attacking the Administration’s budget cuts as “ill-advised,” he warned that “an enormous transfer of Government benefits is now taking place from the very poor to the very rich.” Predicted the former President: “Students, farmers, the aged, mentally afflicted and marginally employed Americans will soon begin to suffer personally and in large numbers.”

Carter denounced “the misguided and radical new policies of the Department of Interior” as a “serious threat to the future of our nation.” Finding it “almost unbelievable” that the credibility of tortured Argentine Publisher Jacobo Timerman could be questioned by a member of the Administration, Carter recalled “the good old days when the American Government attacked the torturers and sympathized with the tortured.” Finally, he contended that the U.S. was giving the Soviet Union an “unwarranted propaganda advantage” by shunning arms-control talks, and argued that Reagan’s approval of large weapons sales was restoring “our former reputation as arms merchant of the world.”