http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/2001200511220837.asp
Witness and Friends
Remembering Whittaker Chambers on the centennial of his birth.
By William F. Buckley Jr.
Editor’s Note: The White House convened a full house (140 guests) at the Executive Office Building on July 9, 2001, 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.
You mean to be conservative, and I know no one who seems to me to have a better right to the term. I am not a conservative. I am a man of the Right. I shall vote the straight Republican ticket for as long as I live.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. . . .
Thank you for posting this link.
Buckley in 2001, speaking of Chambers around 1959, yet it seems prophetic of our current tribulations. Goldwater and then Reagan did get some grip of the actual world we live in, only for us to let their realization slip from our fingers.
Rest now Mister Buckley! You were yourself, the salient point. We bank the fire and will only strive to keep the embers glowing.