http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20071228-1441-bhutto-harvard.html
HOOROO
UNCLE WALLY
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Classmates recall Bhutto's intensity at Harvard
She cherished memories of college days
By Jay Lindsay
ASSOCIATED PRESS
2:41 p.m. December 28, 2007
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.
Linda Mottow-Lippa, who lived in Bhutto's dormitory at Harvard, had a
Romanian cousin who was a staunch anti-Communist. During dinner, he
and Bhutto 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 Thursday
during a campaign rally in her homeland, was remembered by classmates
as 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 entered
Harvard in 1969, but she had a poise that made her seem older,
recalled Mottow-Lippa, a professor of ophthalmology at the University
of California-Irvine.
She had been sheltered by her wealthy and powerful father, who had
also been prime minister. But she seemed eager to experience things
for herself. Before Harvard, the story went, the privileged Bhutto had
never answered a ringing phone. At Harvard, she volunteered to answer
the 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 about 400
students, many of whom knew each other by sight as they passed through
a common area toward Harvard Yard.
"She was one of those people, even then, who you noticed because she
did have a kind of charismatic presence," said Dry, an opera singer
who now teaches at Wellesley College.
To others, she was no more than another Harvard student from a well-
known family. Bhutto later said she relished getting lost in the
crowd.
"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 first
inkling of Bhutto's connections came after she returned from a break
and talked about meeting with Chairman Mao in Beijing.
Johnson, now a Seattle attorney, got to know Bhutto during regular
meetings in their Eliot House dorm, when a group of about a dozen
people would discuss politics and literature. Bhutto and her friends
would hold forth at all hours in all places, particularly the dorm's
dining 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 British
nurse because she was such a pink baby. She would bake for friends and
watched a friend's cat when the friend was away. She often dressed
like a typical Western college student and joined the Signet literary
society.
Bhutto graduated ***** laude in 1973 with a degree in government. Six
years later, Bhutto's father was executed for the murder of a
political opponent.
His daughter later spent five years imprisoned by her father's
tormentors, mostly in solitary confinement. In a 1998 article in The
Crimson, Harvard's daily newspaper, Bhutto said she was sustained
during that time by memories of Harvard, including "long summer nights
that never seemed to end."
Dry recalled a talk Bhutto's gave for the class's 30th reunion in
2003. It was clear she felt a tremendous sense of mission to return
and bring democracy.
"This was something that she was going to do for them, if she could
possibly do it," Dry said.
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