Looking back, Bhutto says her Harvard experience laid the democratic and feminist foundations that she drew on throughout, from prison to the primer minister's office.

Laying a Foundation

Bhutto, now 45, still fondly remembers Harvard as the place where she gained her first exposure to the wonders of a functioning democracy.

Calling Harvard “the very basis of my belief in democracy,” she says that coming to a land where there is freedom, where young students can criticize the president without being sent to prison, fueled her own belief in the democratic system.

According to Bhutto, that “determination to see freedom in my own country, to see rule of law, to see democratic institutions, was born in that period of great intellectual ferment at Harvard,” when the debates over the Vietnam War and the feminist movement raged across campus and throughout the nation.

During that time, she protested the Vietnam War and marched for Third World rights.

“Harvard became a seat of resistance against this unjust war. And yet there were others who were quite gungho about America going to war,” she recalls. “So there would be a lot of discussion--intense, deep [and] heated — on the subject of whether it was a just war or an unjust war.”

Grades, says Bhutto, were not everything. Frequently adopting social causes, like boycotting grapes and lettuce out of support for immigrant farmers, was more important in her social circle.

“Life meant not succeeding in exams, life meant developing oneself as a person,” she says.

Exams were not without their benefit, however. Bhutto says the “constant pressure” of tests, papers, and extracurricular activities strengthened her for the demands of political life.

“It gave me the capacity to endure pain, to endure setbacks which I don’t think I would have had I had not seen life as a series of steps for endurance in a microscope called a course at Harvard University,” she says.

Her Social Circle

Moving in a group of people where “most of us loved to read books on feminism, on the war [and to] argue about them,” Bhutto says she never developed a taste for the social scene of parties and discos.

Instead, she spent late nights discussing the virtues and flaws of democracy, feminism, and the state of the world.

A member of the Signet, a literary society, Bhutto says she would often find herself talking about figures like the Milford Sisters and Anais Nin with friends over milk and cookies.