Kennedy Family Moved by Benazir’s Death
By Stephen Smith Jr.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
When I was a freshman at Harvard two of my close friends were Sanam Bhutto and Murtarza Bhutto, the brother and sister of Benizir Bhutto or “Sunny” and “Meer” as we called them. Meer, like Benizir, was both charming, and a skilled and eloquent debater. At a time when college fashion was anything but chic or classic, he wore elegant velvet dinner jackets and cut a tall figure as polished and handsome and confident as the young Omar Sharif.
He did his thesis on the case for a nuclear bomb for Pakistan, and shortly after he graduated Harvard, Pakistan, under the leadership of his father initiated the development of nuclear weapons. We all considered him (Meer) a likely future leader of his country.
But Meer’s father was overthrown in a military coup, and hung after a show trial. And Meer’s response to his father’s death was swift and angry. He formed an armed resistance movement, was implicated in the hijacking of a Pakistan airliner, and succeeded in securing the release of some of his father’s supporters from jail in return for freeing the hostages The last time that I talked to him he was an internationally wanted man living in Damascus, Syria, under the protection of President Assad. Some years later, he was shot under mysterious circumstances after reentering Pakistan to challenge his sister for the leadership of his father’s party.
Politics in Pakistan and other parts of the world has always been a dangerous and high-stake affair. The tragic death of Benazir Bhutto is a graphic reminder of just how dangerous and violent it can be. The Bhuttos have been compared to the Kennedys in terms of the price that they have paid for involvement in the political affairs of their country and there are lessons to be learned from both their stories.
My father Stephen Smith was slated to run John F Kennedy’s political campaign in 1964 and managed Robert Kennedy’s tragic political run in 1968. He picked up the microphone in the Ambassador in Los Angles hotel and calmed the crowd the night that Robert Kennedy was shot. He never quite got over it. Just as I am sure that the family of Benazir Bhutto will never quite get over it either. Hemingway wrote that “the world breaks everyone and afterwards some are strong at the broken places”.
Afterwards my father was strong at the broken places. He kept on with the work of the Bedford Stuyvesant Community Corporation, the first community development corporation in the country, which he and Robert Kennedy had founded, and raised money and guided memorials for John and Robert Kennedy. He acted as a mentor to Robert Kennedy’s children. He never spent any energy thinking or talking about the various conspiracy theories about the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy. In short, he kept on living and promoting the values of the men who were like brothers and mentors to him.
And this is the simple lesson that is to be learned from all political and other tragedies. All families suffer innumerable inconsolable heartbreaks, the Kennedys and the Bhuttos just live them more publicly. The conditions of life are dangerous and ultimately out of our control, what matters is our moral response to those conditions.
No one understood or demonstrated that better than Robert Kennedy when the night that Martin Luther King was shot he calmed the crowd in Indianapolis with these words.
“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’
“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
“We’ve had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.
“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
“Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much.”
If I could say one thing to my friends the Bhutto family, it would be - the hearts of the Kennedy family and all the American people are deeply moved by the profound sadness and trauma of the people of Pakistan. We understand what it is like to lose a great leader and a family member in a senseless death. Please continue to press for democratic elections and a full investigation of Benizir’s death, but also read this speech by Robert Kennedy and to give a version of it to the Pakistani people. The situation may be desperate but it is not hopeless. Only you have the moral authority to end the cycle of accusation and blame and the rioting and the division. By doing that you will affirm the principle of standing against violence that Benazir Bhutto gave her life for, and make an indomitable meaning out of a tragedy.
(Stephen Smith has served as a negotiation and conflict resolution consultant in Northern Ireland, Africa, and Latin America. He is the nephew of Senator Robert Kennedy and the son of Jean Kennedy Smith, sister of the late President John Kennedy. This article has been exclusively written for Pakistan Link and is being repeated)
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