Witness and Friend: Remembering Whittaker Chambers on the centennial of his birth - July 9, 2001 speech by William F. Buckley, Jr., presidential ceremony - Transcript

National Review, August 6, 2001

Editor's Note: The White House convened a full house (140 guests) at the Executive Office Building on July 9, to recall Whittaker Chambers. Chambers's son was present and brought in to display the Medal of Freedom awarded posthumously to Chambers by President Reagan in 1984. Also displayed, borrowed from the Library of Congress, was a copy of a "pumpkin paper" on which the case against Alger Hiss turned. A bizarre feature of the memorial event was that the White House excluded the press, so that the event had an aspect of a memorial ceremony in the catacombs. The speakers were introduced by presidential assistant Tim Goeglein. They were William F. Buckley Jr., Sam Tanenhaus (author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography), Robert Novak, and Ralph de Toledano (co-author of Seeds of Treason: The True Story of the Hiss-Chambers Tragedy, author of Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers- Ralph de Toledano Letters). Herewith WFB's speech, recalling a friendship with Mr. Chambers.

We were to meet at the National Gallery here in Washington, and I had been waiting for him at the specified corner. I spotted him far down the corridor. It could only have been he, or Alfred Hitchcock. The Sunday before, he had asked me to come down that day, the 8th of June. We had lunch. He had asked me to keep the evening free. "You've guessed what's up, haven't you?" he asked, his face wreathed in smiles.

"I haven't the least idea."

"John!" he said proudly. His son would be married that afternoon, and I was to go to the wedding and the reception.

As he stepped into the elevator that evening, after the ceremony, I saw him framed by the door, his hand and Esther's clutched together, posing while his son-in-law popped a camera in his face-a grim reminder of all those flashbulbs ten years before. I never saw him again. He died a month later, on July 9, 1961, forty years ago, exactly. Free at last.

I first met Chambers in 1954. An almost total silence had closed in on him. Two years earlier he had published Witness. When the preface of Witness appeared as a feature in The Saturday Evening Post, that issue of the magazine sold a startling half million extra copies on the newsstand. The book came out with a great flurry. The bitterness of the Hiss trial had not subsided. For some of the reviewers, Hiss's innocence had once been a fixed rational conviction, then blind faith; and now, after the publication of that overwhelming book, rank superstition.

But the nature of the author was not grasped by the reviewers. I am a heavy man, Chambers once wrote me, apologizing for staying two days at my home. There is a sense in which that was true. But he never appreciated, as others could do, the true gaiety of his nature, the appeal of his mysterious humor, the instant communicability of an overwhelming personal tenderness; his friends-I think especially of Ralph de Toledano-took endless and articulate pleasure from his company.

Witness was off to a great start. But, surprisingly, it did not continue to sell in keeping with its spectacular send-off. The length of the book was forbidding; and the trial, in any case, was three years old, and the cold sweat had dried. Alger Hiss was in prison, and now the political furor centered about Senator McCarthy. Those who did not know the book, and who were not emotionally committed either to Chambers's guilt or to his innocence, seemed to shrink even from a vicarious involvement in the controversy, to a considerable extent because of the dark emanations that came from Chambers; depressing when reproduced, as was widely done, in bits and snatches torn from the narrative. "Until reading Witness it had been my impression," Hugh Kenner, the author and critic, had written me, "that his mind moved, or wallowed, in a setting of continuous apocalypse from which he derived gloomy satisfactions, of an immobilizing sort. The large scale of Witness makes things much clearer. It is surprisingly free from rhetoric, and it makes clear the genuine magnitude of the action which was his life; a Sophoclean tragedy in slow motion, years not hours."

I n 1954 I asked if I might visit him. He had written to a long- standing friend, Henry Regnery, the publisher of my book on Senator McCarthy, to praise the book while making clear his critical differences with its subject. Chambers had been struck down by a heart attack and it was vaguely known that he spent his days in and out of a sickbed, from which the likelihood was that he would never again emerge physically whole. I had every reason to believe that I would be visiting Jeremiah lying alongside a beckoning tomb.

I was taken to his bedroom. The doctor had forbidden him even to raise his head. And yet he seemed the liveliest man I had ever met. I could not imagine such good humor from a very sick man, let alone anyone possessed by the conviction that night was closing in all over the world, privately tortured by his continuing fear that the forces aligned against him would contrive to reorder history, impose upon the world the ghastly lie that he had testified falsely against Alger Hiss, and so erase his witness, his expiation for more than ten years' complicity with Communism.