Harvard classmates, local Pakistanis mourn Bhutto
(Getty Images)
Benazir Bhutto, shown above in 1972, graduated the following year from Radcliffe College at Harvard University.
By Anna Badkhen and Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff
Benazir Bhutto came to Harvard University as a freshman in 1969 and, despite being the daughter of the prime minister of Pakistan, was a shy 16-year-old.
"She quickly made the transition from a shy girl, very protected and two years younger than almost everybody else, to being part of the community,” recalled Peter Galbraith, Bhutto's classmate, close friend, and a former US ambassador to Croatia. “She quickly made friends."
Bhutto's signature gesture in college was to bake cakes for her friends' birthdays -- chocolate cakes with chocolate icing, which she often decorated with her favorite American Halloween staple -- candy corn, Galbraith said today by phone.
"I do remember one birthday party, where I met my future wife. That was in April and [the candy corn] had become quite stale," Galbraith said. "It was a wonderful gesture, but it’s good that she went into politics instead. She was not a very good cook, but she was a great friend."
Bhutto, who served twice as Pakistan's prime minister between 1988 and 1996, was killed this morning in a suicide attack at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, that also killed at least 20 others.
When the phone rang at Abbas Hassan's Leominster home this morning for the seventh time, he sensed that something had happened in his native Pakistan.
“This is such a tragic thing,” said Hassan, who served in the administrations of Bhutto and President Pervez Musharraf.
Bhutto had returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile on Oct. 18. She narrowly escaped injury that day when her homecoming parade in Karachi was targeted in a suicide attack that killed more than 140 people.
"Pakistanis were quite clear that she was taking risks that were endangering her life," said Hassan, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a doctoral candidate at Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. "It became clear she would be eliminated, if not by the terrorists, then by the establishment.”
Bhutto, who had been convicted for failing to appear in court on charges of massive corruption, was a divisive figure among the Pakistani community, said Tahir Chaudhry, president of the Pakistan Association of Greater Boston. Nonetheless, he said, "anybody you talk to right now is upset about this."
"The people I’ve talked to so far feel that this will set Pakistan back," Chaudhry said. "We were moving toward democracy, the military rule was going to go away, there were going to be elections. And now we don’t know what is going to happen."
"This is a huge step backward" for Pakistan, he said.
Bhutto came to Harvard at a time of great social upheaval and joined in antiwar protests, listened to Carly Simon, and attended basketball and hockey games, friends told the Harvard Crimson in a story published in 1989.
"I quickly shed the shalwar khameez [traditional South Asian dress] and reemerged in jeans and sweatshirts from the Harvard Coop," Bhutto wrote in her autobiography, according to the Crimson story. "I let my hair grow long and straight and was flattered when my friends in Eliot Hall told me I looked like Joan Baez."
