The first person I cut was Benazir Bhutto. I don’t recall her very well, except that her writing was poor and that she looked unhappy and a little bedraggled. She was known then as “Pinky,” not Benazir. I don’t think I ever told her she was cut; rather, I left her name off the list of compers asked to move on to the next round after a month or so. I didn’t think anything of it until six years later, when I was a brand new writer in the overseas edition of Time magazine. I was writing a story about unrest in Pakistan, and I read that the daughter of the deposed (and soon to be hanged) prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was vowing a bloody revenge. Her name was Benazir Bhutto. Pinky? I thought.
About a decade later I saw Benazir Bhutto. She was on her way to winning election as prime minister of Pakistan and the guest of my boss, Katharine Graham, the president and owner of the Washington Post Co. Mrs. Graham had brought Bhutto over to the Washington bureau of Newsweek for lunch. I was the bureau chief, and so nominally the host-though in fact Mrs. Graham was running the show. Bhutto was coiffed and elegant, and she spoke articulately and powerfully. She fixed me with her large, dark eyes and said, “You cut me from the Harvard Crimson.” She was not smiling. I sputtered a lame apology. The conversation moved on. The scene was hardly momentous, but it occurred to me, as I wondered why Bhutto was coming back to Pakistan from her comfortable exile at grave personal risk: this is a woman who does not forget.
