Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (20 page)

Professor William Graham, now the Dean of the Divinity School at Harvard, taught Murtaza an Islamic Civilizations course. ‘I think he was curious about me, a white Anglo-Saxon teaching Islam,’ Graham recalls with a laugh, ‘but in the course he was very interested in expanding his knowledge of Islam outside of Pakistan – we covered the African world, for example, and that greatly interested him.’
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In one of his blue Harvard exam books, marked with a slightly deformed-looking B grade on the cover, Murtaza threw himself into Professor Graham’s material. ‘The Islamic system is a society, a state, a thought and art,’ begins his answer, quoting Bernard Lewis (not yet known as the academic-cum-state-department advisor who pushed America to war after 9/11 or even, I suspect, as academia’s premier Orientalist). Murtaza reaches further, connecting his interest in government with the subject of Islamic order. ‘The prophet was a religious head as well as the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. He was a man with absolute and religious powers.’ He scribbled maps beneath his answers, maps of dry farming zones in the north of the Sahara desert and south of the Turkish mountains, explaining the nomadic nature of early Islamic communities. The comments at the end of his
answers, written in pencil, read, ‘Good essay moving from general points to practical illustrations.’

‘I had no sense in class or in our interactions that Murtaza wanted everyone to know who he was,’ said Professor Graham, who also knew the two Bhutto sisters during their respective times at Harvard. ‘He was just Mir as Mir. It was very attractive about him. He didn’t have an
idée fixe
about position or power. He wasn’t pushy, he didn’t come across to me as someone gearing up to be a politician. He didn’t push himself on you, but when he opened up and you began talking to him he was very warm and sociable, easy to talk to.’

In class, Murtaza’s political connections and family gene pool rarely, if ever, came up. He had grown up the son of a politician in Pakistan; that relationship formed the basis of how people saw him back home and he was determined not to let it follow him to college. The times when it slipped were more humorous than anything else. Professor Paarlberg remembers a day in the spring of 1975 when Murtaza, his eager student, missed class. He came over the next time the class gathered for its recitations and discussions and apologized to the professor, saying he had been out of town. Where were you? asked Professor Paarlberg. Washington, Murtaza answered. What were you doing there? his professor pressed on, ‘Well, I had to go to a state dinner,’ Murtaza replied, ‘I thought it might be interesting’. His father had been in town on a state visit to the United States, meeting President Gerald Ford, whose predecessor, Richard Nixon, had been very friendly to Zulfikar and Pakistan. Professor Paarlberg had opened up a can of worms; one of the other students jumped in and asked whether Ford’s daughter, known for her looks, had been a good dancer. ‘Murtaza said she wasn’t as good as he was,’ Paarlberg remembered, laughing, ‘but it took a lot of prodding to get that out.’

On a previous state visit to the Nixon White House, the President was informed that it was his visiting Prime Minister’s son’s birthday. So Nixon sat at the piano and sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to Murtaza. It must have been Murtaza’s twentieth birthday, and he spent it like no other twenty-year-old – listening to wooden Dick Nixon serenade him. That story, however, Murtaza kept to himself.

Towards the end of his junior year at university, Murtaza started to prepare himself for his dissertation. It would be the culmination of all his hard work at Harvard. He discussed the matter with Professor Paarlberg. He wanted to write, he decided, about Pakistan and the nuclear issue. ‘It was the only time his father ever came up in our discussions,’ says Professor Paarlberg. ‘I was concerned about how he would get all the information needed to write a thesis in the face of secrecy and governmental blocks, but Murtaza laughed it off and said he was going home that summer and that he was confident he’d get the required information.’

At the start of his senior year, Murtaza was accepted as an undergraduate associate at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. His acceptance letter, which is postmarked 19 November 1975, sets the guidelines of his association with the Center, a prestigious honour for ‘seniors engaged in research and writing their theses’ and reminds the lucky few that while they have access to the Center’s activities and special seminars they ‘do not normally have access to Center supplies and Xeroxing’.

He was assigned an advisor in the government department to guide him through the process of writing his undergraduate thesis – the only problem, Murtaza wrote in his letters home, was that his advisor, a big name in the department, was also infamously known at the time as the ‘butcher of Vietnam’. His name was Samuel Huntington. Samuel ‘clash of civilizations’ Huntington was then known for his advisory role in Vietnam. Huntington advocated the herding of villagers into clusters away from the Vietcong, not appreciating that it made it much easier for the US army to bomb civilians in their separated enclaves. When I travelled to Cambridge in the spring of 2006, I found Huntington a frail old man. He wore a woolly navy sweater in April and drank Coca-Cola from a Starbucks espresso cup. He shrunk into his brown leather armchair as we spoke and seemed to be so much smaller than his frightening legend suggests.

Huntington told me he remembered Murtaza as a student but ‘not terribly well’.

When I told him that they had worked together on his senior thesis, for which Murtaza was awarded honours, Huntington nodded and mumbled, ‘That’s good’, sounding impressed at his involvement in this particular process. He told me that he and Murtaza met several times a month to discuss his progress on the thesis and that Murtaza ‘wanted very much to write on nuclear proliferation and that we discussed it and I encouraged him’. Of course you did, I thought. You’re Samuel Huntington. Nuclear proliferation must produce a Pavlovian response in a fellow like Huntington; I imagined it excited him terribly. He recalled that he and Murtaza had ‘lively discussions’ (unlikely), that they talked about Vietnam though ‘I can’t remember what he said or I said’ (thankfully), and that he knew the young student’s ‘background was extraordinary but that it didn’t affect him as a student’. He was impressed he didn’t flog his family connections as he struggled to research and write the thesis. I asked Huntington if he remembered my father’s work. ‘As I remember, it was a very good thesis,’ he replied, but struggled to give me more than that. He was a tough person to interview, most of our eleven minutes together were spent with Huntington sifting through notes printed out for him – most were, I noticed eerily, about me – and shrugging his shoulders admitting that he just didn’t remember. ‘I have to tell you,’ he said to me at one point, ‘I have a lousy memory.’
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Murtaza barrelled away at his thesis and threw himself fully into writing and researching it. ‘He was an oddity at Harvard because his senior thesis was on Pakistan having the bomb,’ remembered Bobby Kennedy Jr, another one of Murtaza’s Harvard roommates and friends, when we met at his New York home before an imminent
Rolling Stone
deadline. We had a spot of lunch – I did a lot of eating on my American research tour – and discussed old times. ‘Everyone, including his friends, was aghast at the idea – but he was unafraid to argue it. He had the capacity to defend his beliefs.’
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The final product, ‘A Modicum of Harmony’, was a neatly bound dissertation arguing Pakistan’s right to obtain nuclear power in order
to safeguard its position in the region. Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, Murtaza argued, would guarantee military moderation between it and its neighbouring nemesis, India, and would further stabilize the new country’s position in the region. Murtaza argued that India’s explosion of the bomb demanded that Pakistan follow suit, and if it did so, the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent would not have an overly destabilizing effect on the international system; rather, it would balance it out.

In a letter to her son around the time he had been drafting his thesis, sending his father sections to read, Nusrat writes:

Papa remarked how well you write now and how very mature you are and I suddenly felt you are a grown-up person and not my little baby. I suppose subconsciously I looked on you as a little son of mine, now you are my grown-up son and a man; oof I don’t know what I am writing I have become sentimental – can’t help myself, I love you too much. May you have a happily successful life and may you live to be a hundred years old.

Where Zulfikar was strict and orderly with his sons, Nusrat was effusive and affectionate with all her children. She was a devoted mother who sparkled when she was around her babies, ignoring all norms of discipline and protocol that Zulfikar would strictly insist upon. While Murtaza was at college it was his mother who carried on his habit of cutting out newspaper articles, diligently posting him a packet every two months or so.

‘A Modicum of Harmony’ was read and marked by three college readers. The first called it ‘perversely refreshing’ and found the author’s insights ‘quite elegant’. The examinor continued to applaud the thesis’s integration of political philosophy, mainly that of Hobbes, Rousseau and Machiavelli, ‘a linkage of technical policy analysis and the larger problems of politics which is unfortunately all too rare in writing on nuclear weapons’. The thesis was deemed ‘provocative and well argued’. The second reader, however, was less impressed. Michael Ng Quinn found that the author failed to ‘answer one central question: despite
his recommendation that Pakistan should also go nuclear, why hasn’t she done so?’ The third reader was caught somewhere in the middle. While he found the thesis was ‘argued persuasively’ and felt that the author was ‘able to argue, against what one might first think, that nuclear proliferation may have positive effects on world order and, in particular, may raise the Indo-Pak dispute to a higher level of responsibility’, he had objections with the author’s analysis of the regional dispute in ‘abstract’ and theoretical terms.

But critical though the readers were, the thesis was awarded a distinction and Murtaza Bhutto was awarded honours. His father, Zulfikar, sent a telegram through Western Union on behalf of the family when he received news of Murtaza’s success. The telegram, dated 16 June, is excited and rushed; almost none of the words are spelled correctly. ‘Mumjy, Gugail and I actullay everone of us here join in congratulating you on graduating with honou rzgfrom Harvard (.) It is the outcome of your vhard and devoted labou (.) may you score greater su ccesses in the ffuture. Your loving Papa’. Murtaza graduated from Harvard in 1976 in the top 15 per cent of his class, cum laude.

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I
n the autumn of 1976, Murtaza was en route to England. He had applied to his father’s alma mater, Oxford, and had been given a place at Christ Church to read politics, philosophy and economics. The letter offering him a place was dated 28 November 1975, and cautioned that he might have to do some preparatory work in economics – further proof that one does need maths now and again – before starting his degree, but that, nevertheless, ‘it will give everyone here great pleasure that the family tradition is being continued’.

At Oxford, Murtaza would once more be around his elder sister Benazir. They had overlapped at Harvard, along with Sanam, their younger sister, but though they lived close enough to each other their circles were poles apart and they led conspicuously different lives. They communicated, it would seem, mainly by letter. Benazir sent her brother postcards from her travels. One card from 1974 reads: ‘A fortune teller told me I’d marry at 27 live abroad at a farm and look after sheep and cows’ and is signed BB. Another, from when she started at Oxford, a year before her brother, began: ‘My dear creep’ and goes on to complain that Benazir ‘had to pick up Michael Foot, the minister of unemployment, in my little MG sports car’. That letter is signed Pinky, her childhood nickname. From New Zealand, on a state visit with their parents, she writes, ‘New Zealand was terrific and I met lots and lots of charming people – charming being all those who fell in love with me.’ From Sri Lanka, on another state trip with their father, on a postcard of male Kandyan dancers, ‘Last night three Sinahlese minister’s [
sic
] helped to cover me so I could smoke a cigarette after the banquette without Papa seeing.’ But the best was sent
from Paris: ‘Had to walk for one hour through the Louvre for Mummy’s sake. I loved Versailles. Will you get it for my birthday? Love Pinky.’

As Murtaza’s October arrival at Oxford neared, the Dean of Christ Church wrote to the senior censor regarding the young man’s arrangements. Murtaza had been housed at No. 2, Brewer Street, and it was decided that his address would not be printed in the list of lodgings and residences. The Dean instructed the porters not to give out Murtaza’s address or confirm that he was a student at the college. The note ended presciently. ‘If at any time during his residence here, tension builds up about the politics of Pakistan, special measures may have to be taken, e.g. advising him never to take the same route at the same time of the day if it can be avoided.’