The late Sen. Claiborne Pell meets with Benazir Bhutto in March 1984, a few months after she was freed from prison.

AP

In one room, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States recalled how former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell doggedly pursued the release of Benazir Bhutto from a prison cell. If not for Pell, he said, Bhutto might have died rather than go on to become Pakistan’s prime minister and the first woman to lead a modern Muslim country.

In another room, a former legislative correspondent recalled driving Pell around Washington, D.C., in the senator’s beat-up Chrysler LeBaron. At one point, he said, he had to apply duct tape to the convertible’s soft top.

The two conversations took place within 30 feet and 30 minutes at the reception that followed Pell’s funeral in Newport Monday, providing a striking outline of a man with global reach and a human touch — a leader in foreign diplomacy who managed to be both ahead of his time and, with his quirky duct-tape frugality, a throwback to a different time.

Family members and friends, former staff members and foreign diplomats, Newport aristocracy and everyday admirers packed the reception, which was held at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

At one point, Pakistan’s ambassador, Husain Haqqani, handed Pell’s widow, Nuala, a letter from Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007.

In the letter, Zardari offered the condolences of his country and of his family, saying, “Pakistan will always remember Senator Pell as a strong opponent of [the] dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq and as a champion of human rights and democracy.”

Pell’s “letters and other personal interventions shortened prison terms and, in some cases, saved the lives of Pakistanis fighting for democracy. One such person was my late wife, Benazir Bhutto,” Zardari wrote. “From 1981 to 1984, General Zia imprisoned her, initially in conditions intended to kill her. For three years, Senator Pell waged a lonely campaign first to improve the conditions of her confinement and then to secure her release.”

“My wife knew she owed her freedom and possibly her life to Senator Pell’s interventions and, in one of her first acts after being freed, flew to Washington to thank him,” Zardari wrote. “Let me express my sorrow and that of my nation at the passing of this great man.”

Later, Ambassador Haqqani gathered in a room with two other men to discuss Pell’s legacy. One was Peter W. Galbraith, who worked for Pell and was a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before being appointed by former President Bill Clinton as the first U.S. ambassador to Croatia. (He is a son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith.) The other man in the room was Qubad Jalal Talabany, the Kurdistan regional government’s representative to the United States. (He is a son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani).

Haqqani said the administration of former President Ronald Reagan tended to support General Zia and to “give a pass on everything that was happening inside Pakistan.” But, he said, “Senator Pell took the stance that the rights of the people of Pakistan cannot be trampled upon.”

Galbraith said he got to know Bhutto when they were classmates at Harvard University and Oxford University, and when he told Pell about Bhutto’s imprisonment, the senator took action “because he saw the merits of the case.” If Pell had not been so persistent in advocating for Bhutto, he said, “it’s quite possible that she wouldn’t have lived, and the history might have been quite different.”

In 1981, Bhutto “was imprisoned in circumstances where I believe — and she believed — that the regime intended to eliminate her,” Galbraith said. “She was in a Class C cell in the desert in the middle of summer.” Haqqani said he’s been in a Class C cell, and with a knowing look, he indicated it’s not a place you want to be.

“At the time,” Galbraith said, “the Reagan administration had instructions to American diplomats that they were not to have any contact with the Bhutto family because they didn’t want to alienate Zia, who was considered to be such a valuable ally in the Cold War.”

But Pell championed Bhutto’s cause, using a variety of strategies. For example, Galbraith said the senator once agreed to move along the nomination of Deane Roesch Hinton as the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan without a hearing — as long as Hinton made Bhutto a top priority.

“Every time a Pakistani official would come to Washington, he would raise it,” he said. “He was dogged.”

Haqqani and Galbraith recalled that Pell confronted Zia face-to-face in 1982 when the general came to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting. The punctual Pell was the only senator in the room when Zia arrived. “These were the antagonists,” Galbraith said, “but the first thing Zia wanted was a place to pray, so Pell took the dictator down to his private office so he could say his prayers.”

Afterward, Pell handed Zia a letter regarding seven political prisoners and raised the issue of Bhutto’s imprisonment. Galbraith said Zia was “shocked” and “basically lied,” saying Bhutto was “in comfortable conditions, friends can visit her, she can use the telephone.”

As soon as the meeting ended, Pell told Galbraith to call Bhutto. “She couldn’t use the phone, of course,” he said. “The conditions were not comfortable. And eventually this became so embarrassing to the Pakistani government that when Pell sent me to Pakistan in January of 1984, rather than let me see her … they put her on a plane to Switzerland.” After being freed, Bhutto went to London and then to Washington in March 1984 to thank Pell, he said.

By 1989, Bhutto was prime minister, and Pell and his wife visited her in Pakistan. “Benazir received him like the hero that he was to her,” Galbraith said. At the time, Bhutto was in her mid-30s, with no experience in government, yet she was undertaking “this difficult and heroic struggle to restore democracy,” so Pell offered almost fatherly advice, suggesting, for example, that she remain focused on her main goals and not get distracted by those who wanted to pick fights with her, he said.

What would Pell think of current United States policy toward Pakistan? “I think he would support democracy,” Haqqani replied. “I think he would want the United States to use its influence in the entire region to try and address the issues instead of just looking upon everything as a military problem.”

The three men recalled that Pell introduced the Prevention of Genocide Act in 1988, aiming to put pressure on Saddam Hussein in response to the killing of Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq. “The legislation was a response to Iraq’s using poison gas against the Kurds and a larger program of genocide,” Galbraith said. “It cut off all U.S. and foreign assistance to Iraq and imposed complete trade sanctions.”

As the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pell took the bill to the committee’s senior Republican, Sen. Jesse Helms. “You couldn’t get two more diametrically opposed people ideologically,” but together they got the bill through the Senate the next day, Galbraith said.

The Reagan administration eventually derailed the legislation, but it had an impact. “It produced the largest anti-American demonstrations in Baghdad in 20 years,” Galbraith said. “And Saddam never again used chemical weapons.”

The idea of imposing sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq gained greater currency in the years leading up to the Persian Gulf War and the current Iraq War. And Galbraith said the Prevention of Genocide Act highlighted a point that Vice President-elect Joe Biden had made during the funeral service: Pell was ahead of his time.

Talabany described Pell as “one of the few voices in the United States that wanted to hold Saddam Hussein’s regime accountable for trying to exterminate the Kurds of Iraq.” He emphasized that 1988 was a time when “we had no hope, we had no voice,” and Pell’s legislation “gave us inspiration and gave our people the courage to stand up from the ashes of tyranny and try to build the functioning democracy that we have today.”

“So we mourn his loss,” Talabany said. “We consider it our loss. But we will always value the support that he showed the Kurds.”

A few minutes earlier, in a room down the hall, Richard Dietrich recalled working as a legislative correspondent for Pell from 1993 to 1995 in Washington. Dietrich, now a vice president at the American Farmland Trust, said his duties included driving Pell to receptions and other events in the senator’s old Chrysler LeBaron. “It was a real clunker,” he recalled. “But, you know, that was Senator Pell. He liked things that were old and had a story behind them. He was pretty proud that he continued to get miles out of that old car.”

Still, at some point Pell decided it was time to get a new car, and Dietrich began hunting for a bargain. Pell told him he’d paid $150 for his first car, and he didn’t want to spend more than $10,000 on a new one. He eventually bought a Dodge Spirit from Thrifty Car Rental for $8,000. “It was a white plain-looking car,” he said. “And it was exactly what he wanted.”

These days, senators tend to arrive in big black Suburbans or shiny Town Cars, but Pell was frugal and never flashy, Dietrich said.

When you look at the national political scene these days, it’s clear we could use less flash, less hairspray, less spin and more of what Pell had — a firm grasp on complex foreign policy issues, the steel to confront a military dictator face-to-face, and the relentless drive to pursue the causes he cared about.

efitzpat@projo.com