This is naive and poorly informed. You know you're in the company of lightweights when they quote sportscasters and movies stars as authorities. Allow me to untangle some of this web of canards.

You have to ignore history, utterly, to miss the fact that Communism was widespread among American intellectuals and writers in the 30-40's, for instance. In explaining his CP membership, Heywood Hale Broun was either being funny or trying to avoid being prosecuted in the 1950's for his far left politics a decade before,  as happened to a lot of Americans, civil rights aside.

The dates for his quote don't match up either. He was born in 1918 which meant he went to college in the 1930's, well before ANYONE in the West was fully aware of what Stalin was doing in the USSR. He wouldn't have missed the day when his prof supposedly debunked Marxism because the downside was poorly understood and Marxism's economic insights were widely accepted, the Great Depression providing evidence Marx was right.