Some of the conversations Bhutto had then seem eerily prescient in retrospect.

“All of us would sit there and say that today we are unknown, will a day arise when we too will make a contribution and people will recall us as they recall a group of people known as the Milford Sisters,” Bhutto says. “Will we as a group achieve such recognition?”

The daughter of the president of Pakistan (he was subsequently elected prime minister), Bhutto says she found at Harvard the anonymity she had always craved. The chance to be accepted for who she was--and not who her father was — proved delightfully liberating.

“People accepted me as Pinkie — not as Benazir, because at that time I was called Pinkie — and for the first time, I walked without the shadow of fame stalking me,” she says.

“I was accepted as any other young undergraduate,” Bhutto adds. “We’d go out to movies. Easy Rider had just come out with Peter Fonda, and it was a big hit. I'd take part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War. We’d walk down the Commons and have ice cream. It was a great time.”

“It was a time of immense freedom, a time of immense privacy and a time when I was accepted for being me and not because I was the daughter of somebody, the mother of somebody, the sister of somebody.”

Politics and Friendship

In addition to creating fond Harvard memories, Bhutto says the friends she made at Harvard helped her deal with personal crises later in life.

Of her classmates, Bhutto remembers Kathleen Kennedy Townsend ’73 as someone she found herself relating to when her own father was killed in 1979.

“I was back in Pakistan when [Attorney General and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy '48] was assassinated [in 1968]. When I reached Eliot [House], I found out that Kathleen Kennedy was also one of the undergraduates, and my heart really went out to her.”

“I remember she had at the time a blue parka jacket that belonged to her father, and she would wear it often and keep it very close to her,” Bhutto says.

“My mind went back to her when I [later] lost my own father, and I wanted to keep the clothes he had on when he was executed close to me to feel in a way that I had some link to him.”

Coming to college in a foreign land at the age of 16, Bhutto recalls her impression of Americans as warm and accepting.

She says she “found America to be a very integrated society, prepared to accept, to integrate and to welcome.”

All the same, Bhutto was struck by the number of people who had heard of India but not Pakistan, a realization that led to heated arguments.