Mikhail Gorbachev

* “We knew . . . [the communist] system wasn’t working,” Mikhail Gorbachev says in an interview in Commentary (Nov. 9). But he implies that the capitalist system also has defects, especially when it is for “getting rid of the ABM treaty and for building a missile defense.” He blames this on the “military-industrial complex.”

President Eisenhower also warned us about the military-industrial complex. But we keep letting its lobbyists talk Congress out of paying our dues to the U.N. and into spending our money on nuclear weapons. And it is nuclear weapons that could kill everything on this planet, including our children.

HAROLD WATERHOUSE

Pacific Palisades

* Gorbachev seems not to have forgotten the old Communist Party trick of rewriting history: He never wanted Soviet Communism to be utterly destroyed, all he wanted was a modified, “kinder and gentler” brand of the old and utterly corrupt system. It was, in fact, the efforts of the greatest president of this century, Ronald Reagan, that brought about the collapse of Gorbachev’s favorite form of government.

RON LUTEY

Camarillo

* Gorbachev says they knew in the ‘50s and the ‘60s that the system wasn’t working. Why didn’t Reagan’s CIA know it in the ‘80s?

PAULINE WILLIS

Hemet

* Gorbachev has been through a crucible and remains standing. A survivor, a very astute survivor! I find him an objective observer about things past and things future. Particularly, I appreciate his statement regarding the future of the poor: “Social inequality will erode the legitimacy of the global capitalist system over time as surely as the absence of freedom eroded communism from within.”

Gorbachev is in effect taking on “cybernomics.” It is the present most-dominant Western religion, of course, and obviously, in his view, not on a world-saving course. I look forward to more assessments from the good man.

D.J. PONDER

Torrance