"I was very attached to my pets," Galbraith says.

He was also attached to his family. Both father and son say the family was very cohesive, and Galbraith is still close to his two brothers, J. Alan '63 and James Kenneth '73.

John Galbraith says he instilled an interest in international relations in his sons at an early age, when conversations at the dinner table would center around issues of public policy and international relations.

As a long-haired, rebellious Harvard student, Peter Galbraith pursued these interests further.

A history concentrator, he was active in the anti-war movement. He was co-chair of the Harvard-Radcliffe Indochina Teach-In, which travelled into the community to make citizens and students more aware of issues surrounding the war.

In a second anti-war teach-in that he organized, several prominent Republicans who were opposed spoke at a hotel in Boston while former vice president Spiro Agnew was in the city.

Briefly contemplating a career in academia, Galbraith studied at Oxford for two years and went on to teach at Windham College for four years.

But Galbraith says he realized he wanted to make history, not just to study it, and he began working on Capital Hill.

"Since I left Harvard, I've done very much what I always wanted to do," Galbraith says. "War and peace."

In 1981, Galbraith was instrumental in arranging classmate and close friend Benazir Bhutto's release from prison. In her autobiography, Bhutto names Galbraith as her liberator, the man who engineered her release from prison.

"I made a huge effort to get her out," Galbraith says. Working as an advisor to the Senate at the time, Galbraith says he used his position to speak for her release and for the larger issue of human rights.

The escape reads like a scene from a Tom Clancy thriller.

Galbraith made a visit to Pakistan; Bhutto smuggled him a note describing her situation.

Galbraith says her eventual release was the result of a trap he set to catch the Pakistani president in a false promise. The president told Galbraith that friends could both visit and call Bhutto, but Galbraith found neither to be true.

Before he could arrange for a meeting with her through the president, her captors moved her prison to Switzerland, a move Galbraith attributes to an attempt to dodge him. Soon, however, Bhutto was free.