Friend Tracks Bhutto's Final Trip Home

Ex-Newsweek editor found joy, horror in e-mail from Pakistan
By Caroline Zimmerman,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 3, 2008 5:16 PM CST
Friend Tracks Bhutto's Final Trip Home
Pakistani women light candles in front of a portrait of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto during a vigil at her Pakistan Peoples Party office in this Saturday, Dec. 29, 2007 file photo in Lahore, Pakistan. Many in the West eagerly cast Benazir Bhutto as an icon for Muslim women. While many...   (Associated Press)

In her last e-mail to Benazir Bhutto, Linda Bird Francke asked: "Are you sure you want to be Prime Minister?" The former Newsweek editor, who helped Bhutto write her 1989 memoir "Daughter of Destiny," never did get a straight answer before her friend was assassinated Dec. 27. In homage, Francke gives a window into two decades from friendship with the Pakistani leader.

It wasn't all business, with one e-mail revealing Bhutto's maternal side: "I measure time by looking at trees and my children," she wrote. But it wasn't all roses, either. "Mush has hired an additional lobbying firm for dollars 650 thou to malign me. But we r fighting on," she wrote last month of conflict with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. (More Benazir Bhutto stories.)

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