Classmates at Harvard recall a shy girl, 'Pinkie'

During her first term as prime minister, Harvard alumna Benazir Bhutto spoke at the university's June commencement in 1989. She was a frequent visitor to the Boston area. (Janet Knott/Globe Staff)

Expelled from the prime minister's office for the second time and dogged by allegations of corruption and economic mismanagement, Benazir Bhutto left Pakistan to deliver a speech at a place she called home: the Harvard University campus.

"I'd just like you all to know how wonderful it is to come back home," Bhutto said in that November 1997 speech at the Kennedy School of Government. "I spent four of the happiest years of my life as a student at Harvard University."

Yesterday, former Harvard classmates, friends, and colleagues from the Boston area mourned the assassination of Bhutto, who came to the university's Radcliffe College in 1969 as a shy, 16-year-old graduate of a Catholic school in Pakistan, and who maintained close ties with Massachusetts after graduating in 1973.

"She was a frequent visitor to the Boston area, she spoke at many events here," said Barry D. Hoffman, Pakistan's honorary consul general in Boston.

At Harvard, where Bhutto studied government, 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 W. Galbraith, Bhutto's university classmate and longtime friend. Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, met Bhutto on her first day at the university.

"She quickly made friends," said Galbraith, who for 14 years had served as a senior adviser on South Asia to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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, said Galbraith, whom Bhutto introduced to his first wife.

"I do remember one birthday party, where I met my future wife," Galbraith recalled. "That was in April and [the candy corn] had become quite stale.

"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's Harvard friends knew her as Pinkie. Galbraith was not sure whether the moniker came to be because she had very pale skin, or "because of the socialist politics of her and her family." (Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was one of Pakistan's most democratically oriented prime ministers.)

Memories of her time at Harvard buoyed Bhutto during the five years she spent in jail for opposing Gen Zia ul-Haq, a military dictator who had imprisoned and executed her father, she told the Harvard Crimson in a 1998 interview.

"If I drifted off to sleep, I would somehow find myself back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'd be walking the Commons. I'd be in Harvard Yard, I'd be going to the little corner shop that sold magazines," she told the university newspaper. She called her years at Harvard "the very basis of my belief in democracy."

In 1995, Bhutto arranged a gift of $300,000 from the Pakistani government to Harvard Law School, to support Pakistan-related conferences and research, and to help provide financial aid for Pakistani students attending the school, said Michael Armini, the school spokesman.

Because of the corruption charges against her, Bhutto was a divisive figure among the Pakistani community in Massachusetts. Last month, when dozens of Pakistani students and professionals rallied on Boston Common against President Pervez Musharraf's latest crackdown on political opponents, several protesters criticized Washington for supporting Bhutto, who was accused of corruption in Switzerland, Spain, and Britain, as well as in Pakistan.

Others, like Harvard research felloow Hassan Abbas, who served in Bhutto's second administration in 1995 and 1996, praised her for being meticulously professional. In an interview yesterday, he described her as "very particular and very clear-headed."

Her assassination shook the entire Pakistani community here, said Tahir Chaudhry, president of the Pakistan Association of Greater Boston. Chaudhry called Bhutto's death "a huge step backward" for Pakistan.

"The people I've talked to so far feel that this will set Pakistan back," he said. "We were moving toward democracy . . . And now we don't know what is going to happen."