Classmates recall Bhutto

BOSTON - Even at age 16, Benazir Bhutto was unafraid to express herself, a lesson one college classmate learned when she invited Bhutto home for Thanksgiving during their freshman year.

LindaMottow-Lippa, who lived in Bhutto's dormitory at Harvard, had aRomanian cousin who was a staunch anti-Communist. During dinner, he andBhutto had a loud argument about politics.

"I thought World War III was going to break out right then and there," Mottow-Lippa recalled.

Bhutto's intensity never faded during her time at Harvard, which she later recalled as some of the best years of her life.

The former Pakistani prime minister, who was assassinated Thursdayduring a campaign rally in her homeland, was remembered by classmatesas a woman with a tragic destiny.

Bhutto "knew she had a fate and knew she needed to move forward with it," classmate Marion Dry said.

Bhutto was younger than most of her classmates when she enteredHarvard in 1969, but she had a poise that made her seem older, recalledMottow-Lippa, a professor of opthamology at the University of California-Irvine.

She had been sheltered by her wealthy and powerful father, who hadalso been prime minister. But she seemed eager to experience things forherself. Before Harvard, the story went, the privileged Bhutto hadnever answered a ringing phone. At Harvard, she volunteered to answerthe dorm's common phone on dreaded "bells duty."

"We were happy to let her do it," Mottow-Lippa said.

Bhutto's class at Harvard's Radcliffe College for women had about400 students, many of whom knew each other by sight as they passedthrough a common area toward Harvard Yard.

"She was one of those people, even then, who you noticed because shedid have a kind of charismatic presence," said Dry, an opera singer whonow teaches at Wellesley College.

To others, she was no more than another Harvard student from awell-known family. Bhutto later said she relished getting lost in thecrowd.

"Those years at Harvard were the happiest of my life, because I was completely anonymous," Bhutto told an interviewer in 1988.

Bruce E. H. Johnson, who was a year ahead of Bhutto, said his firstinkling of Bhutto's connections came after she returned from a breakand talked about meeting with Chairman Mao in Beijing.

Johnson, now a Seattle attorney, got to know Bhutto during regularmeetings in their Eliot House dorm, when a group of about a dozenpeople would discuss politics and literature. Bhutto and her friendswould hold forth at all hours in all places, particularly the dorm'sdining room.

Bhutto vigorously defended her country, which was at war with the nation now known as Bangladesh, feeling her homeland had been wrongly portrayed in the U.S. media.

"The one word I would remember about her is intensity," Johnson said.

It wasn't all earnestness and early 1970s idealism, he added.

"She would joke, she wasn't all serious by any means," Johnson said.

Bhutto was known at Harvard as "Pinkie," a nickname given by a Britishnurse because she was such a pink baby. She would bake for friends andwatched a friend's cat when the friend was away. She often dressed likea typical Western college student and joined the Signet literarysociety.

Bhutto graduated cum laude in 1973 with a degree in government.Six years later, Bhutto's father was executed for the murder of apolitical opponent.

His daughter later spent five years imprisoned by her father'stormentors, mostly in solitary confinement. In a 1998 article in TheCrimson, Harvard's daily newspaper, Bhutto said she was sustainedduring that time by memories of Harvard, including "long summer nightsthat never seemed to end."

Dry recalled a talk Bhutto's gave for the class's 30th reunionin 2003. It was clear she felt a tremendous sense of mission to returnand bring democracy.

"This was something that she was going to do for them, if she could possibly do it," Dry said.