From time to time, though, Stone alternated his defenses of Communism with criticisms, and some of these were admirably sharp. He wrote a ferocious denunciation of Stalin in 1956, which you can likewise find in “The Best of I. F. Stone,” a very fine piece, even if he did follow it up in the years to come by putting his faith in still other Communist megalomaniacs — in Fidel Castro at the start of the Cuban revolution (until Stone recognized with dismay that Castro, too, was a tyrant), and in Ho Chi Minh. Anyway, in his last years, Stone seemed to learn from these repeated mistakes. One of the bravest things he ever did was to sign an open letter in 1979 written by Joan Baez, protesting the “totalitarian” policies of the Vietnamese Communists. For some reason, MacPherson fails to mention this letter, nor can you find a mention of it in an earlier and still valuable biography of Stone by Robert C. Cottrell, “Izzy,” which came out in 1992. But that letter has always seemed to me rather impressive. Signing it was brave because Stone had to know that a good many of his own admirers on the pro-Communist side of the American left were going to denounce the letter (which they did with a full-page ad in The New York Times). But signing the letter was brave mostly because, by acknowledging the repressive nature of Vietnamese Communism, Stone risked making some of his own journalism from the war look, in retrospect, less than astute. At minimum, he made himself look inconsistent. But then inconsistency may have been what made him great.

Those years of doing favors for the K.G.B. do suggest that Stone, too, was, in his own fashion, willy-nilly a totalitarian — at least, sometimes. He wrote journalism he knew to be untrue. That was why, in a rueful moment, he spoke about “the morass into which one wanders when one begins to withhold the truth.”