Ted Olson Interview 1

1
ORAL HISTORY OF THEODORE B. OLSON, ESQ.
First Interview
October 19, 2013
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of The Historical
Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is Elizabeth Beske, and the
interviewee is Ted Olson. The interview took place at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher on Monday,
October 19, 2015. This is the first interview.
MS. BESKE: Ted, if it’s okay, I’d love to start by talking about your parents and your early
life.
MR. OLSON: My dad was an engineer with United Airlines. He passed away about 20-
some years ago. My mother is still alive. She is 95-and-a-half.
MS. BESKE: Your parents were from small towns in northern Green Bay, Wisconsin?
MR. OLSON: Yes.
MS. BESKE: From what I best can gather, your dad was the son of Norwegian
immigrants? Or his mother was a Norwegian immigrant, and his father was
the son of Norwegian immigrants?
MR. OLSON: My mother and father were each born and raised in Door County, Wisconsin,
a peninsula stretching into Lake Michigan from Green Bay in northeast
Wisconsin. They met through mutual friends when my father was going to
the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and my mother was at Marquette
University. They did not know each other in high school. My father was a
senior, my mother a freshman.
My father’s father, Walter Olson, was born in Gills Rock, Wisconsin, in
Door County at the Olson homestead. His mother, Elida, was born in Norway
2
and emigrated to the United States at 9 months. They owned and operated a
general store in Ellison Bay in northern Door County.
My mother’s parents, Florence Londo and Yngve Bevry, both were born
in Door County, Sturgeon Bay, I believe. They owned a dairy farm and
cherry orchard in Sturgeon Bay.
My father’s aviation career started at Midway Airport in Chicago as a
radio technician. I believe he was hired because of his ham radio experience
as a child/teenager. He ultimately retired in his 60s with the title of Senior
Vice President of Line Service Engineering for United Airlines, his employer
throughout his adult life.
In 1940, my father was transferred from Chicago Midway to NY
LaGuardia Airport. His job at LaGuardia was considered a protected
category, and hence, he was not drafted during World War II. The family
moved in 1946 to Cheyenne, Wyoming and in 1948 to the San Francisco Bay
Area, as United Airlines moved its principal engineering and maintenance
facilities westward.
MS. BESKE: That’s interesting. You knew some of your grandparents. As best I can tell,
your mother’s mother passed away when you were 26. Florence Bevry, and
your mother’s father, whose name I am going to mispronounce.
MR. OLSON: It’s Yngve. Unusual spelling. Yngve Bevry.
MS. BESKE: That’s why I was not so bold as to venture. He passed away when you were
17. Are they the people you would visit when you’d go and visit?
3
MR. OLSON: When I visited during the summers, I would spend the first half of the
summer with my mother’s parents, whom you just identified, in Sturgeon
Bay. They had a cherry orchard. They grow pie cherries up in Door County,
and I’d pick cherries and pitch hay and dig potatoes, farm-type stuff. And
then the latter part of the summer, I would go up to the northern part of the
peninsula where my dad’s parents’ general store was. After a while they had
sold that and they had a little place on a small lake, Europe Lake, and I’d
spend time with them in the woods and fishing.
MS. BESKE: You have a brother and a sister?
MR. OLSON: I have a brother and three sisters.
MS. BESKE: Where do you fall?
MR. OLSON: I’m the eldest, then I have a sister, and then a brother, and then two sisters.
MS. BESKE: Are any of them still in Wisconsin?
MR. OLSON: No. My brother and one sister are in the Los Angeles area. One sister is in
Lake Tahoe, and one is in the San Francisco Bay Area. All of us spend time
during the summer back in Door County, Wisconsin, and my mother does
too. We have about seven places up there. Grandchildren, nephews, nieces
all come in and out at different times.
MS. BESKE: You were born in Chicago?
MR. OLSON: I was born in Chicago.
MS. BESKE: What brought your parents from these two different communities in
Wisconsin to Chicago?
4
MR. OLSON: My dad got a job with United Airlines in Chicago. He was a radio
technician/engineer. I think he started in 1938 or 1939. I was born in
Chicago and lived there for 19 days, and then we moved to New York. I had
my first commercial airplane ride when I was 19 days old on United Airlines.
And then we lived in New York for about five years. My sister was born
there, and then United moved its maintenance base to Cheyenne, Wyoming.
We lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming for two years, and then we moved to the
San Francisco Bay Area around 1947 or 1948.
MS. BESKE: So you were in Mountain View, is that right?
MR. OLSON: We lived for a while in Redwood City, and then Menlo Park, and then
Mountain View/Los Altos. The latter house was right on the borderline
between those two cities, and I went to Los Altos High School.
MS. BESKE: Silicon Valley, before it was Silicon Valley. Mountain View, of course, is
now the hub of Google. What was it like growing up?
MR. OLSON: It was a typical, I suppose a typical, bedroom community. Hewlett Packard
was there, but a large part of the Los Altos area was apricot trees and a small
community. A lot of people who lived there worked up the peninsula
towards San Francisco. That’s where my father was, in South San Francisco,
where the airline, and the airport, was. But Los Altos was just another small
bedroom community.
MS. BESKE: Your mom was a stay-at-home mother?
5
MR. OLSON: She raised the five of us, then she went back and got her college degree and
then her master’s degree in English Literature, and then a teaching credential,
and she wound up teaching at San Jose State, one of the community colleges.
MS. BESKE: How old were you when she went back to start that process?
MR. OLSON: I think I must have been in my 20’s because I was away from home. She was
doing the schooling when my youngest sister was born, which was probably
about 1956 or 1957. I don’t know when she started taking the classes to get
her college degree.
MS. BESKE: The span between you and your youngest sibling, is that about 16 or 17
years?
MR. OLSON: Yes.
MS. BESKE: In your book, Redeeming the Dream, you dedicated it to your mom, who
instilled in you a passion for learning reading, and writing. Was it the
process of watching her go back and seeing her through this?
MR. OLSON: I dedicated the book to my wife, Lady, and to my mother. My mother had a
passion for writing. She taught us about literature and her own passion for
literature. As we were growing up, she loved Dickens and many other great,
classic authors. And she would occasionally write an essay or a poem or a
vignette about growing up. I don’t know when all this came together, but
later it came together in a couple of self-published books that she put
together. There were always books around, and she would instill in us a
love of reading and what you can learn from reading, and we would talk
about things like that.
6
MS. BESKE: Do you recall her reading to you when you were tiny?
MR. OLSON: I don’t actually have a specific memory, but I have no doubt that a lot of that
occurred.
MS. BESKE: You graduated from Los Altos High School in 1958.
MR. OLSON: I started my sophomore year there, so I started there in 1955 and graduated in
1958—as a part of the first graduating class of Los Altos High School.
MS. BESKE: Before that, had you been at Redwood City?
MR. OLSON: We were in Redwood City for a couple of years, then we moved to Menlo
Park. Menlo Park I was a freshman at Menlo Atherton High School, and
before that at public elementary and intermediate California schools.
MS. BESKE: I’ve heard you describe your early memories of your family as the Ozzie and
Harriet family.
MR. OLSON: I don’t remember saying that, but I suppose in those days that was somewhat
what it was. We were a mother, father and children living in a suburban
community. The father working, and the mother making sure the rest of us
behaved.
MS. BESKE: What do you recall from your two years at Los Altos High School?
MR. OLSON: Three years. My sophomore, junior, and senior years. It was a good school.
It was a couple blocks from home. The teachers were reasonably good. I
was on the track team, and the other students there were nice people. It was a
good experience.
MS. BESKE: Were you a sprinter or a distance guy?
MR. OLSON: I was a middle-distance runner. Half-mile.
7
MS. BESKE: Then you decided to attend the University of the Pacific in Stockton and
graduated in1962. It seems from everything I read that you had a wonderful
experience there.
MR. OLSON: I did. I almost went to Stanford. Stanford was right next door, and I applied
for and was accepted for a Naval ROTC scholarship at Stanford. The last
step in the process of the scholarship was the physical exam. I went up to
San Francisco and had a physical exam. I think it was two days, but maybe it
was just one day. They determined that I was color blind, the kind of color
blindness that a lot of men have. Not totally color blind, but weakness in the
red/green colors. At that point, they weren’t interested in me anymore for the
NROTC scholarship, which was a blessing in disguise because I would have
gone to Stanford and gotten a great education there, but I would have then
had to serve in the Navy for four years. I don’t know whether I applied, or
how it came about, but I must have applied to a couple of other places
besides Stanford. The University of the Pacific (at that point, “College of the
Pacific”) was about a two-hour drive away, and it had a nice reputation. It
wasn’t Stanford. But I went over to Pacific, and I had a wonderful
experience there because I signed up for the debate team, and there was a
wonderful coach there. I got a full scholarship ultimately, a forensics
scholarship. The tuition was not cheap, so that helped. I spent a lot of time
debating. I spent a lot of time with the newspaper. I was editor of the
newspaper a couple of semesters.
MS. BESKE: Did you do debate in high school?
8
MR. OLSON: I hadn’t. I hadn’t been on the debate team. I probably had given a few
speeches, but I hadn’t been a part of the organized forensics group.
MS. BESKE: Tell me more about your debate coach, Paul Winters. I read a bit about him,
and I know he passed away last year. It sounds like he was a remarkable
influence in your life.
MR. OLSON: He was an incredible teacher, one of those people that comes along very
rarely. Here we were, the whole school was about 2,000 or 3,000 people,
and we had a debate team, or a forensics team, because it was oratory,
interpretative reading, extemporaneous speaking, impromptu speaking,
discussion, salesmanship, radio and television. Everything. And we had a
squad at some tournaments as large as 30 people. We would go to
tournaments throughout, particularly, the West, but the Midwest, and
frequently walk away with sweepstakes trophies because the team was so
good. We would be competing in tournaments with 60 to 70 other
universities, places like Stanford and USC and Northwestern, and we would
walk away with these trophies. He was a marvelous teacher. He also taught
classes. I took a class called Argumentation from him and a couple of speech
classes. He was a superb and inspirational teacher. He went to these
tournaments with us, and he loved the students. He was very progressive in
the sense that he’d go out and find students in the university that hadn’t even
thought about wanting to be on the forensics team.
MS. BESKE: Yourself included?
9
MR. OLSON: I volunteered. In fact, it was almost the first thing I did when I got to
Stockton, and I can’t recall what prompted me to do it, but I signed up.
There was a tournament on campus, I think it was late September, early
October. I had just arrived. He put me together with a woman who was a
sophomore, and we won five out of six debates. That surprised us both,
including the coach, so it went from there.
We had a woman on the team who had been Miss Arkansas. We had a
young man on the team who was a ventriloquist and he had a radio program
in Stockton. We had a blind black evangelical minister on the team. Another
black man who was the son of a union organizer in Oakland. Lots of women
on the team. One of our colleagues was John Redhorse, who was an
American Indian. It was a stunningly diverse squad, but he was looking for
talent, to put together winning debate teams.
MS. BESKE: That’s amazing. I read that at one point you all took a trip to Texas for a
debate tournament and there was an experience in which one of your
teammates was turned away from a restaurant in Amarillo?
MR. OLSON: We were on our way to a tournament in either Kansas or Oklahoma. We
took the train. Once in a while I went on an airplane because I could still get
reduced fares because of my father, but most of those trips we either drove or
we took trains. So we were on the train, and the train went down from
Stockton through Amarillo before it turned north and up into Kansas or
Oklahoma. We had a few hours’ layover there and we went out to dinner.
There were about six of us as I recall, and we were turned away. We had one
10
black man with us. He was the one who was the son of a union official. I
want to say organizer. His father was a reasonably prominent person, I think,
in whatever union it was in Oakland. His name was Horace Wheatley, and
he was a tremendous young man. He always was exceedingly well-dressed.
Better dressed than the rest of us, kids wearing junky clothes and so forth.
Horace was always well-dressed. Everybody liked him. We were turned
away from a couple of restaurants.
MS. BESKE: What did they say?
MR. OLSON: “We can’t serve you here.” “We can’t serve him here.” I don’t remember
what they said. I remember that we were turned away because of him, and it
was not any question that that’s what it was. We were more upset I think
than Horace was. He had a marvelous disposition. He handled himself with
great maturity, probably more maturity than you would expect from a kid
that age.
The second place we were turned away was a Chinese restaurant, which
was very upsetting. I think that one of the places said that we could eat in the
kitchen. We left and went back to the train station.
MS. BESKE: Did you confront them at all?
MR. OLSON: Yes. We did. I don’t remember the details. There weren’t any police, no
shouting or anything like that. I think we were stunned. We were students.
I’m pretty sure there was no coach with us, so I think we were upset, but we
weren’t going to cause a big civil disturbance. Maybe we should have, but
we didn’t. We wound up going back to the train station and having dinner.
11
MS. BESKE: You hadn’t seen anything like that in California?
MR. OLSON: I had not that I can recall. I’m sure growing up anywhere in the 1950s there
must have been things that we saw, but I don’t recall it. I grew up in the
San Francisco Bay Area, and I don’t recall that kind of overt discriminatory
conduct, and it certainly wasn’t at Pacific. The fraternity that I was in was
fully integrated. Every possible background you could think of was
represented in that fraternity.
MS. BESKE: That’s fairly remarkable for that time period.
MR. OLSON: It was. The other two fraternities were all white, and I don’t think there were
even Jewish members. But our fraternity had young men from every
conceivable background, members who were had Chinese, Jewish, Catholic,
Italian, African-American, Indian, everybody. We were very proud of our
diversity.
MS. BESKE: What fraternity was that?
MR. OLSON: It was the local fraternity. It was called Arcania, Alpha Kappa Phi, affiliated
with a national fraternity. Somewhere during my third year, fourth year, Phi
Kappa Tau was the fraternity that they affiliated with.
MS. BESKE: Do you think it was Paul Winters, the ethos, that made you seek out diverse,
interesting people?
MR. OLSON: I don’t know whether those are direct cause-effects or not, but that was the
environment that he had created, that there were people of all backgrounds
and we were all in it together.
12
MS. BESKE: Your parents also, that was sort of the dynamic growing up as well, wasn’t
it?
MR. OLSON: I don’t remember specific incidents, but I do remember there was no question
in my mind that intolerance of people of different backgrounds would not
have been accepted and would have been clearly unacceptable.
MS. BESKE: You graduated in 1962, with Honors awards, lots of awards. What prompted
you to go to law school, and did you immediately go to law school?
MR. OLSON: I immediately went to law school. When I graduated from high school, I had
done well in math, and when I went to Pacific, you have to indicate your
major, and I decided that I was going to be a math major. As soon as I got
involved in the debate program, I changed my major to speech. I had a
double major, history, too. Once I got into the forensics program, we were,
as I said, we weren’t just debating. We were giving oratory, which was a ten
minute prepared speech, interpretative reading, all kinds of speech and
contests of every sort. I think I was already interested in law in high school,
but that solidified it. So it was clearly what I wanted to do by the time I
came anywhere close to graduating. So I applied to law schools.
MS. BESKE: And you chose Boalt.
MR. OLSON: Yes.
MS. BESKE: Going into law school, where did the Ted Olson of 1962 see himself in ten
years. What were your goals?
MR. OLSON: To get through law school.
MS. BESKE: Did you want to go to a firm?
13
MR. OLSON: I had never met a lawyer until my senior year, I think it was my senior year,
at Pacific, when I got into a little scrape with the administration because I
was editor of the newspaper and I published a cartoon that was intended to be
satirical but it really made one of the professors mad.
MS. BESKE: What was it? Can you describe it?
MR. OLSON: This professor was an outspoken critic of the sororities, maybe Greek life
itself, but particularly the sororities. I found a cartoon – this was just an
amateur, childish stuff, as kids do, but I published a cartoon. It was a cartoon
of a couple necking at a local place where people would neck, and
underneath I put a caption, it said something like “philosophy professor
discusses PanHellenic relationships on Friday evening,” or some silly thing
like that. And he said it was libelous, that I was implying that he was having
an affair with a sorority girl, which had not even crossed my mind. I thought
it was just a joke. But he was pretty serious about it. He actually threatened,
as I remember, to sue me. Looking back on it, it was ridiculous. I found a
lawyer in Stockton and went to see him, and he said don’t worry about it,
you’re going to be okay.
MS. BESKE: So it was dismissed?
MR. OLSON: He went away. I don’t even think the attorney had to do anything.
MS. BESKE: Did you have to publish a retraction or anything?
MR. OLSON: They wouldn’t have made me because I wouldn’t have done that. Now I’m
looking back on it, you know, your memory is selective, but my memory is
that I published a statement saying that the cartoon that we published has
14
been misconstrued by someone as suggesting a personal relationship between
a professor and a student. But it was just satire, and the only ridiculous thing
about it is that anybody would take it more seriously than that. I said
something like that. So it was backhanded, it wasn’t really a retraction.
MS. BESKE: So you had that interaction with the lawyer, which I’m sure helped you with
the concept that lawyers solve problems.
MR. OLSON: Well it didn’t really. It was just the first lawyer that I had ever really known
because in our neighborhood there were no lawyers and nobody at my
father’s work were lawyers. It was just that by then I was reading books
about lawyers, reading great debates and stuff like that. And I had been very,
very successful in speech and forensics. So by then there was no question
that that’s what I wanted to do.
MS. BESKE: You get to Boalt, and you’re in the Class of 1965. You were on the Law
Review, the Order of the Coif. They didn’t have a chapter at Columbia.
MR. OLSON: I’m surprised because I thought it was everywhere.
MS. BESKE: Just a couple of schools don’t have it as far as I can tell. You had your 50th
law school reunion in 2014, and your classmates included I’m sure loads of
luminaries but what jumped out at me was Rose Bird and my mom’s old law
partner Dave Dezzani. At law school you became active in the Republican
party?
MR. OLSON: I had been active in the College Federation Young Republicans at Pacific.
MS. BESKE: Tell me about that.
15
MR. OLSON: I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember that 1960 was the big
election between Kennedy and Nixon, and I think that my memory is that we
passed out signs or stickers or whatever campus activities. But I do
remember that, and I do remember going to a couple of College Federation
Young Republican meetings off campus. I can’t remember doing anything
specifically, but I remember a little bit of that activity. And then at Boalt,
which they’re now calling Berkeley Law. It’s still Boalt, but also they’re
trying to call it Berkeley Law. The Dean explains it this way. He said that
everybody in the United States knows Boalt Hall because it’s a very
prominent, successful, respected law school, but if you go to India, no one
knows what Boalt means, but if you say Berkeley, they know. And of course
there’s a big international student body at Boalt. So anyway, yes, we had our
50th reunion this spring.
MS. BESKE: Was it your first year of law school in November when Kennedy was killed?
MR. OLSON: No. It was 1963, my second year.
MS. BESKE: Do you remember anything about that?
MR. OLSON: Yes. I mean just like everybody else, it was just an unbelievable thing. I
can’t remember the chronology exactly, but there was the Cuban Missile
Crisis, which was a big, huge event for all people alive at that time because it
was a very dark event. People were very much afraid that that was going to
lead to nuclear war. And then the next event, I remember the moment, it was
in the morning when news rippled through the student body, we were
attending classes that President Kennedy had been shot and then soon
16
thereafter the word came that he had been killed, that he had died, and that
whole weekend, that was a Friday, I think it was a Friday, or maybe it wasn’t
a Friday, but I just remember the next couple of days were dark days with
people glued to their television. And I remember the capturing of Lee
Harvey Oswald and the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald and all of those
things. I don’t think anybody who was old enough to have a memory in
those days can ever forget that period of time.
MS. BESKE: Sure. The shooting of Oswald was two or three days after the assassination,
wasn’t it?
MR. OLSON: It might have been three, but it was probably two, because they arrested him,
and then they arraigned him. They brought him to the police station. And it
happened on live television. I don’t remember whether I actually saw it in
real time, but of course it was repeated and repeated and repeated and then
there were the funeral services and so forth in Washington, D.C., and
Mrs. Kennedy flying with Lyndon Johnson to Washington, and all of those
events.
MS. BESKE: That must have been a crazy time period. So just really kind of a handful of
people were involved in Republican activities at Berkeley, right?
MR. OLSON: There weren’t very many Republicans in Berkeley then.
MS. BESKE: At that point, was Berkeley starting to become the Berkeley that it became
two or three years later.
MR. OLSON: Well it already was a very liberal, activist campus, it just manifested itself
during those years to a greater degree. It devolved into the Free Speech
17
Movement while I was there. That was 1964 or 1965. There was the
Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater election in 1964, and our little group was
supporting Goldwater, but no one really cared in Berkeley. No one took any
of us seriously.
MS. BESKE: What about Goldwater was appealing to you?
MR. OLSON: He was a conservative, so all the things that Barry Goldwater sort of stood
for – limited government, individual liberty, the antithesis of the
Great Society, and all of those things, conscience of a conservative, that kind
of stuff appealed to me. We all realized he wasn’t going to win. I spent the
summer of 1964 at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York City.
MS. BESKE: So did I.
MR. OLSON: Did you really?
MS. BESKE: Yes. That’s funny.
MR. OLSON: Well that was the summer of 1964. So that was the summer of the
conventions. It was also the summer there were riots in New York, Bedford-
Stuyvesent and Harlem. You could see the conventions on television. The
Barry Goldwater Convention was at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. So it
was a very, very tumultuous time in politics and in New York. There was
also the opening of the World’s Fair out at what became Shea Stadium, near
LaGuardia. So we’d get on the subway and go out to the World’s Fair. I had
gotten married at the beginning of the summer.
MS. BESKE: Beginning of the summer of what year?
18
MR. OLSON: The summer of 1964. I got married in June to Karen Beatie. We went to
New York, we drove I think for a week up to New England for our
honeymoon, and then we came back and settled in on East 18th Street. When
were you at Cravath?
MS. BESKE: I was there the Summer of 1992. I worked with Paul Dodyk.
MR. OLSON: Oh, he was there when I was there. Had they moved?
MS. BESKE: Where were they when you were there?
MR. OLSON: At the Chase Manhattan Plaza downtown.
MS. BESKE: It was right before the midtown revitalization. We were at 48th and 8th,
which was then a sketchy area, in a brand new building.
MR. OLSON: I remember reading about the move. But when I was there, it was all the way
downtown. They’d put two of us in an office, and the first office they put me
in, I looked out the window and it’s on the 58th floor and I’m looking down
over the Statue of Liberty. It was just incredible. Quite a place, Cravath.
MS. BESKE: It was a very amazing place. So did you ponder perhaps going to Cravath
after graduation?
MR. OLSON: Yes. I had been offered a job in San Francisco for that summer at Pillsbury
Madison & Sutro and at Gibson Dunn in Los Angeles. And that was the first
year Cravath had hired anybody, I think this is correct, from the west coast to
be in the summer program, and they hired two of us from Boalt. We both
went out there, went to New York, and of course it was a great thrill for me
to be a part of Cravath Swaine & Moore and its history and tradition, and
I’ve read that book about Cravath and so forth. And I wanted to have my
19
mind open about it, and I did have my mind open about it, but at the end of
the day, I couldn’t see raising a family in New York City, because I’d grown
up in Los Altos, which was really far away, both geographically, and
everywhere there’s grass and there are backyards and there are things like
that. We were living on a tiny walk-up apartment on East 18th Street, which I
think growing up in California would have been thought of as really kind of a
questionable neighborhood but was actually owned by this person who was a
senior editor at the Saturday Evening Post or something like that, so I
thought, wow, that’s success here? That’s not what I see in California. Plus
Cravath was pretty well known as making very very few partners out of the
few people that were hired. And at that point I wanted to go to a place and
practice law, become a partner. By then I had refined my thoughts about that
sort of thing. So as great as they were, and everyone was very nice to me and
I clearly understood what a marvelous place it would be to practice law, I
thought the best place for me and a family that I presumed that I was going to
have would be to live in California. I was leaning toward San Francisco
because that’s where I had grown up, but San Francisco was at that point
kind of sleepy. The law firms were not growing very fast. It really mattered
who you were related to. San Francisco, stodgy, formal; whereas Los
Angeles was the wild west. Both O’Melveny and Gibson Dunn were
growing fast, so I went down to Los Angeles, and Gibson Dunn was where I
wanted to go.
20
MS. BESKE: When I was at Cravath, as a summer associate you were assigned to one
partner and you worked with a team of associates at various stages. Is that
how it worked for summer associates when you were there?
MR. OLSON: No. That’s how it was working then, but for some reason they treated me a
little bit differently. The managing partner for a long time, Sam Butler, I
worked some with him and then some with Roy Victor. He was a corporate
partner. I actually did some work for Sam Butler, some for Roy Victor, some
for two or three other partners.
MS. BESKE: That’s very interesting.
MR. OLSON: I just did what I was told, and it was great. The people were terrific. So I
had a little slightly different experience, but I knew that if I were to come
back, I’d be told which department I was going to be in and I would be
assigned to one little silo. So that’s another thing that I wasn’t terribly fired
up about. Gibson Dunn then was, and we do it to a certain degree now, was
saying you’ll come in and do some litigation and then labor work and then
corporate work and then tax work and then we’ll move you from six months
to six months to six months through these various departments. I thought
that was great.
MS. BESKE: It gives you some exposure to different areas.
MR. OLSON: And I thought I wanted to be a tax lawyer because I was very challenged by
the tax courses and problems in law school. I soon realized I wanted to be a
litigator.
21
MS. BESKE: I’m going to take you back to the election of 1964 when you were still in law
school. You’ve mentioned that Goldwater appealed to you for his
conservatism, but it was a conservatism that a generation later is quite
different from the conservatism, the social conservatism that sometimes
predominates in American politics now. He was more libertarian. You
mentioned his embrace for individual liberty was something that appealed to
you, and that’s something that I think is a little bit different from what we
saw later.
MR. OLSON: Right. I can’t remember too much about the social conservative part of it.
That seems to me to have arisen in more robust flavor later, inspired perhaps
in part by Roe v. Wade and other developments that got people to focus on
things like that. Growing up in California it wasn’t something that was too
much in the forefront of the conservatives that I knew. So to the extent that
I’m a Republican and call myself a conservative, it’s those things about
individual liberty, limited government and so forth. Local government to the
extent that it works well with local problems and so forth.
MS. BESKE: Do you recall October 1964 Reagan’s “A time for choosing” speech? Did
you see that? It was not the nominating convention speech, but it was the
speech.
MR. OLSON: I remember the speech very well. I believe that I saw it during the campaign,
but I don’t recall a specific incident of actually having seen it. But it became
so well known that it became part of our California Republican Ronald
Reagan culture.
22
MS. BESKE: The year that you graduated, the Supreme Court issued Griswold, LBJ gave
the Great Society speech, Martin Luther King was arrested in Selma. It was
a heady time, it’s fair to say, and that is the atmosphere into which you
emerged as a new lawyer. I guess 1965 was right before sort of everything
went to heck in terms of unrest at campuses.
MR. OLSON: It was happening already. Like I said, the Free Speech movement. It was a
tumultuous time at Columbia, at Berkeley, at Madison, at other campuses.
On campuses and in the cities, there were riots. In New York in the summer
of 1964; there were the Watts riots, in the summer of 1965 in Los Angeles. I
felt like they were following me around.
MS. BESKE: So you were there in Los Angeles?
MR. OLSON: I graduated in June and I went immediately down to Los Angeles. I was
studying for the Bar exam. The riot took place in South Central Los Angeles.
MS. BESKE: Where were you living?
MR. OLSON: I lived that first year in Santa Monica, which if you know the city is directly
west.
MS. BESKE: You were married to Karen. Where did you meet her?
MR. OLSON: At Pacific. She was two years younger, and she joined the debate team.
That’s where I met her.
MS. BESKE: Had she ever been on your team with respect to any competition?
MR. OLSON: We went to tournaments together. She had her own debate colleague, they
paired us up by twos, and it was mostly in those days women debated against
women, and women in the individual events competed against other women.
23
But the team was almost equally divided between women and men, and we’d
go off to these debate tournaments in three, four, or five cars and drive up to
Oregon or wherever a tournament was. The whole team was very cohesive
as a group, so we became friends and some of us started dating.
MS. BESKE: You have two children?
MR. OLSON: Yes.
MS. BESKE: Kenneth and Christine?
MR. OLSON: Yes.
MS. BESKE: When were they born?
MR. OLSON: Christine was born in 1966 in Santa Monica. And my son was born in 1969
also in southern California, in Torrance.
MS. BESKE: How was the experience of having little kids?
MR. OLSON: Oh they were wonderful.
MS. BESKE: Did you ever get time away?
MR. OLSON: In retrospect, I wish I had spent more time with them. On the other hand, it
is what it is in a large law firm and the time that it takes to do what you want
to do and to learn how to do it well.
MS. BESKE: At the law firm, one of your mentors was William French Smith, and he was
very much involved in Reagan’s inner circle and in the gubernatorial
campaign. Can you tell me about him?
MR. OLSON: He was a prominent senior partner in our firm, and he was a labor lawyer.
That was one of our four departments. But in many respects, a
senior/corporate business counsel revered by many business and political
24
leaders. Labor and Employment, we called it the Labor Department, but it
was management side of labor things. You couldn’t very well be on both the
union side and the labor side, so we were on management side. He was
prominent in the firm and a prominent and successful lawyer in that field, but
he was also prominent in Republican politics. I can’t remember all the things
he had done, but he was the person in the firm that I thought of and
everybody thought of as one of our leading Republican figures. So not long
after I joined the firm, I can’t remember how long, I went to him and said
that I wanted to be involved in that. I wanted to practice law full time, but to
the extent I could dabble in it or do things that would involve me in it, I
wanted to do that. And he said great, and he sent me out immediately
starting to give speeches where he’d be invited to give speeches. I remember
the first thing he said, “I’ve got a speech the day after tomorrow in front of
this business group about campaign finance and legal restrictions on
campaign finance, giving money and expenditures of money,” and I said, “I
don’t know anything about it.” And he said, “Well it won’t take you long to
learn. There’s just a few little chapters, the federal law, the state law, you
can learn it fast, and you can give this speech, and you can become an
expert.” Which is sort of what I did. Now the irony today you have to have
a whole law firm to run for office. You have to have accountants, the laws
are so complicated no one can understand them, including the election
lawyers. But that sort of was my start. And he sent me off to business
25
groups, business roundtable, chamber of commerce-type groups to talk about
campaign finance.
MS. BESKE: On behalf of a particular candidate?
MR. OLSON: No, as an expert. As a lawyer. Not on behalf of anybody. But we also
evolved. He was a part of what they called the Reagan Kitchen Cabinet, and
you must have read about this.
MS. BESKE: I did read about it, but I don’t know much about it.
MR. OLSON: It was a group of people who knew one another; they were prominent
Republican businesspeople in California who had decided that
Ronald Reagan was a person for the future in Republican politics.
MS. BESKE: As a result of his speech?
MR. OLSON: As a result of his speech and what else I don’t know. But there were a dozen
or more very prominent people, and they did business with one another.
Bill Smith was the only lawyer in that group as I recall. That group of people
helped inspire Ronald Reagan to run. They helped him get organized. They
were people that he talked to about things, and then we did legal advice, we
the firm. This is over a period of time. I can’t remember how incrementally
it grew, but we wound up doing his tax returns. One of the partners in our
firm did his tax returns. Bill Smith was a counsellor. I wound up doing odds
and ends, litigation-type stuff when one of the kids would get in trouble, or
one issue here, or some issue there, I would do it. And Bill trusted me, and
the Reagans trusted me. So that’s sort of how that evolved.
26
MS. BESKE: I didn’t do my homework and find out precisely what he was doing before
the speech. Obviously, he was an actor to a certain point. Was there
something in between that and the speech?
MR. OLSON: I’m not sure of the exact – and I’m on the board now of the Reagan
Foundation – I’m not sure of the exact chronology, but he became a
corporate spokesperson, and he hosted a television drama series. He was
hired by General Electric to be a corporate spokesperson to talk about things
that interested General Electric, which included things like taxes and things
that affected the culture in which this big corporation operated. But Ronald
Reagan was an unusual corporate spokesperson because he would go all over
the United States, and maybe all over the world, but I know he would go to
plant floors and talk to workers and he’d give these speeches, and he’d give
these radio addresses, and he’d write these things himself. He’d talk about
America, and he’d talk about culture, and it was common sense stuff. It was
very appealing, and he honed his ability to write and speak.
MS. BESKE: And to connect.
MR. OLSON: And to connect. And when you think back at it, you can think what in the
world would be a better preparation to be a successful politician and maybe
even a President of the United States than to go to these places in Peoria or
Sioux Falls, here and there and walk around and circulate and understand
their problems. He had been a labor leader. He had been president of a
union like five times. He was charismatic, and he was a very good writer.
He would write most of his own stuff. So during this period of time, that
27
speech grew out of the fact that he already knew how to give speeches. I
don’t know what the specific – probably historians have that all over the
place – but I can’t remember the specific events that caused him to wind up
doing that, but then it evolved from there.
MS. BESKE: I watched the speech this morning, and it’s unbelievable. I can see exactly
why it put him on everybody’s radar screen. It’s a tour de force. So Reagan
has Smith in the Kitchen Cabinet. Reagan runs and is elected in 1966 as
Governor of California, and how then does the firm’s and specifically your
relationship with him change?
MR. OLSON: It continued along that same line. Bill Smith was appointed to be Chairman
of the Board of Regents of the University of California so he interfaced with
Governor Reagan. Governor Reagan was the titular head of the University of
California as Governor, and Bill Smith was then Chairman of the Board of
Regents, and of course there was all that student dissent and activity and
political activity. There was a lot of turmoil. I held one position in the
administration. He appointed me to be a member of the California
Commission on Uniform State Laws. That’s a group that exists in every
state. The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws
are the ones that develop things like the Uniform Commercial Code and the
Uniform Probate Code and the Uniform this and that. It includes professors
and scholars and practicing lawyers.
MS. BESKE: Like ALI?
28
MR. OLSON: Yes, and it puts together these laws. They engage professors who are
reporters, then people come out and put papers together and they start
developing actual codes that states adopt. Now the Uniform Commercial
Code is everywhere, but all these other Uniform laws, if there were still
things as libraries, you’d see the Uniform Probate Code, Uniform
Testamentary, et cetera. Anyway, I was on that. This is sort of a digression.
So I was on the California Commission and went to various meetings of the
Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, which was a fascinating thing. The
stuff was really apolitical. No politics whatsoever. These guys would debate
where the commas had to go and how these laws would work.
MS. BESKE: Were you in the weeds and the substance, or were you more sort of
supervising their work?
MR. OLSON: I was a member of the Commission. I didn’t actually get involved in creating
specific Uniform Codes, but each year when the Commissioners came
together, there were half a dozen proposed Uniform laws on the books. They
would be debated year after year after year until everybody was satisfied that
they’d been debated sufficiently enough, then they became a proposed
uniform law, and then that would be sent out to the states which would then
decide to adopt that uniform divorce law or uniform this law. I guess that’s a
bit of a digression because it had very little to do with Ronald Reagan or
anything except that I don’t know how he appointed me to this, and it was
kind of a fun to do. Very academic, and not political.
29
But then we got involved in the 1976 campaign, and Bill Smith was
head of the California delegation. I was an alternate delegate. That was in
Kanas City, and it was a close thing. Ronald Reagan almost toppled
Gerald Ford. It came that close. Ronald Reagan was again fantastic. He
gave a couple of speeches at the convention. The one speech at the
convention after it was clear that he had lost, the votes had already taken
place, he addressed the convention, and if you’ve ever been at one of these
conventions, you can’t hear yourself think because there’s so much noise,
noise, noise, and the only people who know what’s happening at the podium
are the people watching on television because you can’t hardly hear anything,
but when Ronald Reagan spoke, after having lost to Gerald Ford, you could
hear a pin drop in that place, and it was a fabulous, beautiful speech about
don’t lose, you know, the shining city on the hill kind of don’t lose your
ideals or inspiration, don’t be discouraged, this is a great country, blah blah
blah. It was a great speech.
I don’t know if I’m answering your question or not, but anyway, that
happened, and then four years later we were in Detroit.
MS. BESKE: Right after Reagan became Governor, obviously you alluded to the
University of California and all of its unrest, but one of the pillars of his
campaign was clean up all this mess in Berkeley. What was your perception
having just graduated from Boalt a couple years prior? There was the
Bloody Thursday in 1969.
30
MR. OLSON: It was crazy, and what was going on was, and I think a benign way to look at
it was students exercising their fledgling passion for democracy and control
and revolting against top-down, stuffy leadership from old people. On the
other hand, it was chaos. And I had seen some of it at Berkeley because we
had a part of that semester where the free speech movement was going on. It
didn’t affect the law school quite as much, but there were picket lines and
you couldn’t go to class and people were out standing up on cars and giving
speeches and so on and so forth, and it struck me as – I mean I agreed with
the idea that this is not what should be going on in sit-ins in the Dean’s office
and that sort of thing, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.
MS. BESKE: Did you feel as the oldest member of your family, born in 1940 you were
probably five years older than the group that then erupted in the summer of
1968 and things like that, did you see your younger siblings, for example, on
the other side of a kind of a generational, the sea change line?
MR. OLSON: No. My younger siblings were pretty much, I mean we were each different,
but none of them got involved in anything serious. No, I didn’t see as a
family on the other side of that divide. In a sense, in a law firm, as you
know, you’ve got young people coming in every year every year and every
year and in a way they’re kind of inspirational. They’re smart, young, eager
people that want to learn and want to practice law and want to be successful,
and it was a pretty open life in California. There was a lot going on in
California. I didn’t participate in things that were against the law. But there
was lots of stuff going on around, a very libertine, liberated society in those
31
days. And of course there were all the protests against the war, the
assassination of Martin Luther King and all that horrible stuff.
MS. BESKE: I guess as a guy your age probably everybody had a draft card, and you got
lucky?
MR. OLSON: I was lucky. When I went to law school, you were still able to get a student
deferment, and when I graduated from law school, the student deferment was
ending and around that point, my wife was pregnant with my daughter, and
there were deferments for people who were married and were having
children. I can’t remember the exact specifics, but I never got quite to that
point. Now one of the guys in my law school class who went to Gibson
Dunn with me went into the Coast Guard or something like that to avoid
being drafted and going off to Vietnam, and other people did similar things,
but I was just probably one year ahead of the time when that would have
happened to me.
MS. BESKE: But you had friends and colleagues who did go over?
MR. OLSON: Yes. I had friends who did go, and my wife’s brother, who was one year
younger than her, so she was two years younger than me, he was one year
younger than her, he was drafted and went to Vietnam and spent two years
over there. So yes, there were people all around.
MS. BESKE: I’ve got you now all the way up to the 1980 election, and it might be a good,
natural stopping place. I’m happy to keep talking, but probably better to just
start that next time.
32
MR. OLSON: Okay. We can pick up at that point because as the 1980 election approached,
I got very much involved with Bill Smith.
MS. BESKE: We have ten minutes. Can we talk about that?
MR. OLSON: He was, I think, head of the California delegation. I was a delegate. I was
co-chair of something called California Lawyers for Ronald Reagan. We did
a whole bunch of things – writing articles and stuff like that. I think I had a
couple of newspaper op ed pieces about why I’m a Republican or why I’m
voting for Ronald Reagan thing. We helped out election night. During a
couple of these election years, I would organize lawyers in the firm to help
out with issues that arose on election night, people not being able to vote,
people trying to keep the polls open longer than one side thought, and the
other election issues that come up on election night. I remember one time
when we found out that I had a whole group of people on this floor of the law
firm doing the Republican side of stuff and we found out that the lawyers on
the other side were on one floor above in the same law firm. So there were a
lot of issues like that, and I did some work for Lieutenant Governor
Mike Curb. There was a big issue that went to the California Supreme Court
when Jerry Brown was running for President and Mike Curb was Lieutenant
Governor and was exercising the powers of the governor when the governor
was gone. It was a big issue that went to the California Supreme Court. So I
did a lot of election stuff, including Republican litigation and so forth.
Then at the convention in Detroit, Ronald Reagan, of course, was the
nominee. A big issue came up the day that I arrived in Detroit because at
33
that point there was consideration being given to having Reagan select
Gerald Ford to be his Vice-Presidential candidate. That was being bandied
about by the national press, and it was actually being talked about in the
inner circles, and Bill Smith asked me to find out the implications under the
12th Amendment of both Ronald Reagan, who was a Californian, and by then
Gerry Ford was a Californian – he lived in Palm Springs – and the electoral
college won’t let the electors of a particular state vote for a president and a
vice-president from the same state. So if you had two people, and this could
come up conceivably again if it was Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, for example,
you couldn’t have that because you couldn’t have the possibility of winning
the presidential election and losing the vice presidency. So I had to go off
secretly to the Detroit Bar Association library on a Sunday or something like
that and do research about the 12th Amendment, how we could get around the
12th Amendment, and what we could do about the 12th Amendment, and I
came to the conclusion, and I wrote a paper, and I wish I had a copy,
concluding that it would indeed be a problem, but the problem could be
solved because the convention then was July or August, and Gerry Ford
could move to – he had a place in Colorado, I think it was Colorado – but he
could uproot his formal residence and then be in another state, so that
wouldn’t be a problem. That was all sub rosa. I think Bill Smith’s secretary
typed it up in the room, and we had two copies or something like that. At
any rate, by the end of the week, the whole idea fell apart because Gerry Ford
wanted more power than Ronald Reagan was willing to cede to a vice
34
president. Because he had been President. And George H.W. Bush became
the nominee for vice president.
MS. BESKE: Were you involved in the selection of George H.W. Bush?
MR. OLSON: No.
MS. BESKE: That is fascinating. I had no idea that the 12th Amendment imposed such
obstacles.
Okay, so at this point we’re up to Detroit, and we’ll start up next time with
the post-convention, the election itself, and pretty quickly on the heels of the
election you made your move to D.C., right, in January of 1981?
MR. OLSON: I actually moved, I got on the airplane and came here around the third week
of February.
MS. BESKE: So we’ll pick up there next time.