Robeson Sugarcoated

Paul Robeson was prodigiously talented and a victim of racism. However, in order to tell his story truthfully, you need to confront his long complicity with Stalinism, which was the moral equal of Nazism (“PBS Revisits Another Victim of McCarthyism,” by Susan King, Feb. 24).

Neither PBS nor King chose to deal candidly with Robeson’s support for Stalin’s anti-Semitism, the show trials, the treaty with Hitler, the treacheries against the non-Soviet left, etc. The public doesn’t need more knee-jerk hagiographies. Is our appetite for these cardboard Potemkin village heroes really so voracious? Is the truth really so bad that we should be willing to settle for happy pretense in its place?

VINCENT COX, Los Angeles