Bhutto's Death Reverberates At Harvard

By SETH GITELL, Special to the Sun
December 28, 2007

BOSTON — Benazir Bhutto's death at the hands of an assassin outside of Islamabad, Pakistan, yesterday, is reverberating across Harvard College, from which the Pakistani opposition leader graduated in 1973.

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Steve Liss / Time Life Pictures / Getty

Bhutto at Harvard's commencement exercises in January 1989, when she received an honorary degree.

Bhutto, the daughter of Zulficar Ali Bhutto, himself executed in 1979, arrived at Harvard as a shy international student in 1969 and returned triumphantly to deliver the university's commencement address two decades later as her country's prime minister. Bhutto's first friend at Harvard was Peter Galbraith. Mr. Galbraith, the son of a Harvard professor and former ambassador to India who knew the senior Bhutto, John Kenneth Galbraith, met Bhutto before the start of classes and tried to introduce her to life at Harvard and in America.

"She was a very timid shy girl. I arrived in ratty clothes, put my feet up, smoked cigarettes, and described life at Harvard," Mr. Galbraith, speaking from Norway where he was vacationing, told the Sun. "I'm sure she left horrified." Bhutto's time at Harvard introduced her to a diverse group of students, many of whom helped shape America after her graduation. They included: a pollster for President Carter, Patrick Caddell; a Washington Post columnist, E.J. Dionne Jr.; a managing editor at Time magazine and head of the Aspen Institute, Walter Isaacson; and an assistant managing editor at Newsweek, Evan Thomas.

While Bhutto, known on campus as "Pinkie" staunchly defended her home government, which was embroiled in a controversial war in East Pakistan, today known as Bangladesh, she joined other Harvard students in protesting America's war in Vietnam. "The antiwar movement was at its peak and I marched with thousands of other students from Harvard in a Moratorium Day rally on the Boston Common and in a huge rally in Washington, where, ironically, I caught my first whiff of tear gas," Bhutto wrote in her 1989 memoir, "Daughter of Destiny." Bhutto wrote she "was nervous pinning on my 'Bring the Boys Home Now' button." "I had opposed the Vietnam War at home and was becoming even more radicalized by the antiwar fever in America," she wrote.

But if she dabbled in America's political obsessions of the era, her personal preoccupation was Pakistan. Mr. Galbraith recalled a lively political discussion that took place in Mr. Caddell's room on April 21, 1971. "It was an intense discussion of what the Pakistanis were doing in East Pakistan… Benazir's father was actually in prison, she was defending the Pakistani government and military. She held her own," Mr. Galbraith, who served as America's ambassador to Croatia in the Clinton administration, said.

At Harvard, Bhutto, according to her book and Mr. Galbraith, familiarized herself with campus culture and American life in Cambridge at that time – jeans from the Harvard Coop, peppermint stick ice cream cones with "jimmies" at a local ice cream parlor, Brigham's, apple cider and candy corn. "I loved the novelty of America," she wrote.

She failed in her attempt to join the school's student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, where she was supervised and, ultimately, cut by Mr. Thomas. The Newsweek writer next encountered Bhutto just prior to her election as prime minister, when she was lunching with the owner of the magazine and The Washington Post, Katharine Graham. Bhutto confronted Mr. Thomas, saying "you cut me from the Harvard Crimson." He wrote on the Newsweek Web site last month, "it occurred to me, as I wondered why Bhutto was coming back to Pakistan from her comfortable exile at grave personal risk: this is a woman who does not forget."

Bhutto, having been imprisoned in Pakistan in 1981, became her country's prime minister in 1988. The following year, she delivered Harvard's commencement address. According to a 1989 report in The Harvard Crimson, she said: "In countries without established traditions of representative government, democracy is always at risk. All too often there is the overly ambitious general, the all too determined fanatic, or the all too avaricious politician," she said, words that now seem prophetic.

Bhutto's Death Reverberates At Harvard

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