Hartford Courant: "Late Card Evokes Memories"
Ned Lamont And Benazir Bhutto Shared A Friendship Going Back To The 1970s
EARLY THIS MONTH, about two weeks after his old college friend and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan, Ned Lamont received this Christmas card from her. Lamont made friends with Bhutto when both were undergraduates at Harvard. (MICHAEL MCANDREWS / January 17, 2008)
by Christopher Keating, Hartford Courant, January 19, 2008
http://www.courant.com/news/custom/topnews/hc-ctlamont.bhutto0119.artjan19,0,816669.story
In the late 1980s, two college friends exchanged letters, congratulating each other on the political victories each had recently enjoyed.
One had just been elected third selectman of Greenwich.
The other had just been elected prime minister of Pakistan.
It was just a small event in the friendship of Democrat Ned Lamont and Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in Pakistan Dec. 27 as she attempted to regain power.
About a week into the new year, Lamont received a late-arriving Christmas card from Bhutto, mailed days before she was killed, becoming the fourth member of her family to die as a result of political violence.
The card read, “Praying for Peace in the World and Happiness for your Family in 2008.”
Lamont had not seen his old friend in four years — when they reminisced over lunch about their days together as undergraduates at Harvard, when she was known on campus as “Pinkie.”
Despite knowing that his friend was in danger, Lamont was still stunned by her assassination two months after Bhutto returned home from exile.
“I was shocked — even though this woman lived every day knowing it could be her last,” said Lamont. “It really gets you right in the gut. ... She was told not to go. She was told her life was in danger.”
Lamont, who met Bhutto in the 1970s, became well-known statewide in 2006 after spending $16 million of his own money to defeat U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in a Democratic primary before eventually losing to him in the general election.
But back in the 1970s, Lamont was just a college student when he met the young member of a famous family of Pakistani royalty.
“I knew her in college pretty well, and I knew her brother very well,” Lamont said in a telephone interview from Greenwich. “Her brother, Mir Bhutto, lived right across the hall from me. It was through him that I met his older sister.”
Benazir Bhutto made history at the age of 35 in 1988 when she became the first woman elected prime minister in a Muslim country. She served a second term before being ousted more than a decade ago.
Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was ousted as prime minister in a military coup in 1977 and executed by hanging two years later. One brother committed suicide under mysterious circumstances in France; another was slain after a public rally in Karachi, Pakistan.
Benazir Bhutto was later imprisoned for opposing the country’s military dictator, but she eventually succeeded her father.
When Lamont was at Harvard, students knew that Bhutto’s father was the prime minister. But she was never pompous about her status — while at the same time taking her studies seriously and speaking perfect English, Lamont said. She entered Harvard at the age of 16.
“Unlike almost anybody else you meet in college, you could see her being prime minister,” Lamont said.
The two became close enough friends that he visited her in England after she graduated from Harvard and was president of the famed Oxford Union debating society. Another Harvard classmate, David Ignatius, wrote recently that he, too, visited Bhutto at Oxford and remembers her “wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt, the one with the sassy tongue sticking out.”
The Christmas card exchange was a long-running tradition between Lamont and Bhutto.
Lamont, 54, admits that it was “weird” to receive the card after his friend’s death. “I was just so staggered to hear that she had died,” he said.
Bhutto appeared fearless in the weeks before her death, and she was not deterred even after she returned home in October and her motorcade was attacked by a suicide bomber. When Bhutto was asked by a reporter for NBC News if it would be worth it if she died, Bhutto responded, “Everybody has to die one day.”
For nearly a decade, Bhutto had been living in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai, but she once again felt the call to return to her own country despite the risks.
“To me, it was fatalistic,” Lamont said. “She felt like she and her family had a greater responsibility to a greater Pakistan. She had a really nice life in Dubai. She could have stayed there and had a very nice life.”
http://www.courant.com/news/custom/topnews/hc-ctlamont.bhutto0119.artjan19,0,816669.story