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

And, always looking within the Marxist world for amplification, he found it. You see, I am an Orgbureau man. But if the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to the masses of people-why somebody else will. Then there will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into singularity. The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in, you find at the back an old man, fingering for his own pleasure some oddments of cloth. Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel. . . .

He had made up his mind to do something else. He enrolled at Western Maryland College as an undergraduate.

He had quit National Review, he had failed to complete the book that Random House had been expecting for six years. He did not want to sit at home, half crippled and denied the life he would, I think, have liked most to lead, the life of a dawn-to-dusk farmer. Whittaker Chambers was all Puritan about work. Idleness was incomprehensible to him. But there was another reason for going back to school. In Europe, Koestler had said to him sharply: "You cannot understand what is going on in the world unless you understand science deeply." Very well, then, he would learn science.

He threw himself into his work. Science courses galore. For relaxation, Greek, Latin, and advanced French composition. Every morning he drove to school and sat among the farmers' sons of western Maryland, taking notes, dissecting frogs, reciting Greek paradigms, working tangled problems in physics. Home, and immediately to the basement to do his homework. Everything else was put aside.

He signed up for the summer session but in the interstice between terms he drove north to see his daughter, Ellen. En route he spent a day with us on a hot afternoon. How do you get on, my wife asked, with your fellow undergraduates? "Fine," he said, puffing on his pipe. In fact, we learned, he had an admirer. A young lady-aged about nineteen, he guessed-shared with him the allocated carcasses of small animals, which the two of them, in tandem, proceeded to disembowel. He had written to me about her. For months while we worked together she addressed me not a word, and I was afraid my great age had frightened her. But last week she broke silence. She said breathlessly: "Mr. Chambers?" "Yes," I answered her anxiously. "Tell me, what do you think of 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-dot Bikini'?" He recalled the question now with laughter. He hadn't, at the critical moment, any idea that the young lady was talking about a popular song, but he had improvised successfully until he could deduce what she was talking about, and then confided to his co-vivisectionist that it just happened that this was one of his very favorite songs. Her excitement was indescribable. From that moment on they chirped together as soulmates, pooling their knowledge of spleens and livers, kidneys and upper intestines.