whiptail: How to redirect output to environment variable?
It appears that whiptail(1) writes its control output to the termininal based on the setting of the TERM environment variable. Conseqently, you can't use the standard output stream of whiptail(1) to set a variable. Also, whiptail(1) writes the user-input of the input box to the standard error stream so, again, you can't use its standard output stream to set a variable.