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ORAL HISTORY OF THEODORE B. OLSON, ESQ.
Fifth Interview
December 2, 2016
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 Friday,
December 2, 2016. This is the fifth interview.
MS. BESKE: It is December 2, 2016, and I am here with Ted Olson. This is Elizabeth
Beske, and this is our fifth interview. Last time, we got through the election
of 2000, and I want to start with your February 15, 2001, nomination as
Solicitor General. How did that nomination come about?
MR. OLSON: After the election was finalized, the Bush team put in place their transition. I
guess they had started before the resolution of the case. I think the two
competing camps were evaluating transition issues at the same time. And
then after December 13th or whenever – it was twelfth or the thirteenth – the
Bush people spent more time focusing on transition and selecting people for
the cabinet. And at some point I was asked whether I was interested in
coming into the administration. And I can’t recall who asked me or under
what circumstances. And I thought about it some and let them know that I
would be interested in coming in if they were interested in appointing me to
be Solicitor General.
MS. BESKE: So you specifically requested that position?
MR. OLSON: Yes, I said that if I was going to come into the administration that was the
only position that I was interested in. I can’t recall whether anybody asked
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me about any other position. But I had been in the Justice Department in the
Office of Legal Counsel, and the one other office in the Justice Department
that I had great admiration for was the Office of the Solicitor General. It’s a
small office about the size of the Office of Legal Counsel, with highly
talented people, rich in tradition, and a wonderful opportunity of course to
argue cases before the Supreme Court. And to be the voice of the United
States in the Supreme Court. So that’s all I was interested in doing.
MS. BESKE: Were you a little reticent to return to public service after your experience
with the Independent Counsel?
MR. OLSON: Yes. But I thought I would take the chance if I could be Solicitor General,
and I noted, I think I’m remembering this correctly, that the Solicitor General
does not generally have to appear before congressional committees. I think I
knew that at the time, and I never did as Solicitor General. So I stayed away
from that kind of trouble. But yes, I had reservations. And I had reservations
about whether at that time in my life I wanted to take the differential in
earning, and I decided that the opportunities were so great to have that
position that I would do it if I could.
MS. BESKE: Great. Now the confirmation hearings were somewhat bumpy. I guess,
initially at least the chair Senator Hatch and David Brock sort of got
involved. Do you recall that?
MR. OLSON: Yes, I do. I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly what David Brock did.
MS. BESKE: I think he testified before the Judiciary Committee, and then there was an
article I guess regarding your role – he made allegations regarding your role
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in the so-called Arkansas Project. The Washington Post picked up an article,
and that caused Hatch to temporarily suspend the hearings.
MR. OLSON: I can’t remember that specifically. He may have started off on some parts of
the hearings. He didn’t suspend anything where I was actually testifying. It
may have been postponing my own participation. I don’t recall. I don’t recall
Brock testifying. I do recall that Brock got involved and it was highly
critical, and part of that related to the work of the American Spectator. And
there were other articles that were critical, I think, largely in connection with
that work in The New York Times and in The Washington Post. And I do
remember that created considerable controversy. I think there were other
things. I think there were people who were unhappy with my role in the
presidential election recount and Supreme Court litigation. There were a lot
of raw feelings after that election. Just as there are now after our most recent
presidential election. And a lot of people were angry about the whole
Supreme Court decision, everything that happened in Florida, and I think that
there were a lot of people on the Democratic side of the aisle, including at the
Senate, that weren’t about to provide me with the opportunity to be an
advocate in the Supreme Court after what I had done to them. There was
some of that. Not so much stated overtly, but a lot of it was coming back to
me. There were other things that people were unhappy about, including the
whole Independent Counsel thing and whether I had been a bad person in
connection with that. There were plenty of grievances.
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MS. BESKE: Now on May 25th, as people expected, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords
defected from the Republican Party, became Independent and started
caucusing with the Democrats. This occasioned a transition in power in the
Senate. One might have expected that would defeat your confirmation, and
instead it had exactly the opposite effect.
MR. OLSON: Well, I had already testified by that time so I had testified in the Senate
Judiciary Committee. It took two-thirds of a day as I recall. That was, I can’t
remember exactly when the date of my testimony was, but there’s all this
anxiety that builds up when you’re in the midst of one of these clashes
between the two parties at Congress. So it was very hard for me to get much
work done or anything because I didn’t know what the outcome was going to
be. And then I do remember on the highway going home, or something like
that, when I heard on the news that there’d been that switch and therefore a
switch in control – because it had been fifty-fifty with Dick Cheney having
the tie breaking vote. And then it became fifty-one to forty-nine. And I
thought that’s the end of it. I almost drove off the road. You know because it
came in over the radio, NPR or something like that, and I thought well that’s
the end of it. Now I’ve been through all of this and now it’s not going to
happen. Because they could never bring it to a vote if they didn’t want to.
And it was leading up to Memorial Day, and within a couple of days, or very
shortly thereafter, I was told they were in fact going to bring my nomination
to a vote before the recess. And I was told that they didn’t want this hanging
over the new Democratically controlled Senate. They didn’t want to have to
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deal with it after the recess. They didn’t want to take office and take control
of this Senate officially and have that still on their plate. So I was told they
were going to allow a vote to take place. And it was I think the afternoon
before people broke away for the Memorial Day weekend. I don’t know
whether it was a Wednesday or a Thursday. I was asked whether I wanted to
go over there to the Senate to watch the vote. I said not a chance in the world
do I want to be present for all of the speeches and the votes and so forth. So I
stayed in my office with a couple of pals here, and we heard the vote come
in, and it was a real nail-biter because it went right down to the very end. The
vote was finally I think fifty-one to forty-seven.
MS. BESKE: It was, yes.
MR. OLSON: So that means two Senators didn’t vote.
MS. BESKE: Right. And you got Zell Miller and Ben Nelson.
MR. OLSON: Yes, that’s right. Those two Democrats voted for me, so that got me to the
fifty-one. And someone was ill, and somebody paired up with that person
who was ill on the other side, so that explained the two senators that didn’t
vote. But it was very squeaky, and it wasn’t clear until the very end.
MS. BESKE: Did the fact that they indicated they were going to bring it to a vote preclude
the idea of a filibuster? So you knew there was going to be a vote not a
filibuster is that correct?
MR. OLSON: Yes.
MS. BESKE: Okay, great.
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MR. OLSON: And they wouldn’t have needed a filibuster. Well, if they’d controlled
whether there’d be a vote or not they wouldn’t need to filibuster unless those
two senators who wound up voting for me were going to join the Republicans
in insisting on a vote. I don’t think that’s how it played out. I think that they,
the leadership decided that we don’t want to start our regime with Olson.
MS. BESKE: Right. They wanted a display of bipartisanship.
MR. OLSON: Well it wasn’t exactly bipartisanship!
MS. BESKE: True. Okay, so you got confirmed May 25, 2001. So what did you do next?
MR. OLSON: The minute that vote happened my wife organized a trip to the grocery store
to get lots of steaks and invited as many people as possible over to our home
to vent, release the pressure, and so forth. And then we, I think the next day
we flew immediately to our place in Wisconsin and got away for a few days.
And then when I came back I arranged to be sworn in.
MS. BESKE: So that would have been early June? You took the oath of office on June 11th.
And had you already passed your Gibson work off to colleagues?
MR. OLSON: Yeah. Somewhere during that whole period I had done that. You got the date
of June 11th, where did you get that?
MS. BESKE: I think I got it from The New York Times article. Does that seem wrong to
you?
MR. OLSON: I’m just not sure.
MS. BESKE: Okay.
MR. OLSON: It’s probably right. I’ll have to look at the certificate. But I went over to,
maybe it was then, but I’m not sure why I waited that long. I think that the
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woman who was acting as Solicitor General, who’d been a deputy to my
predecessor, wanted to stay as Solicitor General for a week or so to finish up
filing briefs that were responsive to Supreme Court invitations.
MS. BESKE: CVSGs?
MR. OLSON: Yes. The Supreme Court once in a while invites the views of the government
and she told me, Barbara Underwood, told me that if it was okay with me,
she would stay in office long enough to be the person signing those briefs. I
felt that that was a reasonable request. And so that’s why it was so long after
that actual confirmation vote. Otherwise I would have wanted to get it done
immediately so that I could finally be Solicitor General. I waited until then,
and a few of us went over to the Supreme Court, and I had a swearing in in
Justice Thomas’ chambers. And then we had a public one later on.
MS. BESKE: And so, what were your first impressions of the job?
MR. OLSON: Well, it was everything that I anticipated and more. Such a wonderful place.
The people over there are fantastic. The lawyers, many of whom have been in
that office for years, some who still are to this day. I knew several of the
people and had great respect for them. Their commitment to their job, their
commitment to the Constitution, commitment to the Justice Department and
to the Supreme Court, the whole works. Such wonderful people over there.
The staff is a wonderful, dedicated group of people. It’s unbelievable how
much work they do with such a small group of people. When you consider
the job includes filing oppositions to cert petitions in many hundreds of cases
probably, the number of cert petitions that are filed against the United States
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– that’s a huge number I don’t even know how many. Plus filing briefs, filing
cert petitions, preparing for oral arguments, filing briefs in support of amicus
briefs that the United States files. Plus ruling on every request by anybody in
government to appeal a decision that’s adverse to the United States. That
appeal recommendation process involves an incredible amount of work, and
where there is any significant issue, it does come actually to the person of the
Solicitor General. And those are about two thousand a year, and they involve
stacks of paper that can be several inches thick. About eight a day. So the fact
that all of that work gets done by such a small number of people is just
mindboggling.
MS. BESKE: How many people?
MR. OLSON: About twenty lawyers.
MS. BESKE: Wow, that is amazing.
MR. OLSON: Yes, and the staff, a few assistants, a couple of paralegals, a messenger, a
couple people like that. Probably not more than twenty persons on the staff.
So it’s staggering how much work that they do. And the quality of the work
is so inspirational. So I was ecstatic, and I still am, about the people and the
job and the institution. And so much rich history. So many wonderful people
have held that office or worked there. It is very touching. And of course
you’re constantly pinching yourself because of the magnitude of the
responsibility when you stand up or when you file a piece of paper in the
Supreme Court you are the United States. So you’re speaking for the White
House and the administration and you’re speaking for the Department of
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Transportation and the Secretary of State and the FCC and the SEC. You’re
speaking for all of them. And you have to get it right as much as you can.
Nobody’s perfect, but you have to get it as right as possible and you have to
be respectful of positions that the Antitrust Division has taken for the last
forty-seven years or something like that and not conflict with the position
that some other department is taking. So it’s a huge responsibility, and the
gravity of it is significant, so it is a very exciting place to be.
MS. BESKE: The fact that there was a transition in the administration, did you feel that at
all when you joined the office?
MR. OLSON: No. Absolutely not. Nowhere in the Justice Department did I feel that. And
particularly in the office, I felt that I was embraced enthusiastically by the
people there, and they gave me wholehearted support in every possible way.
It helped that I had been in the Office of Legal Counsel. Lots of people in the
department had been exposed to me, had worked with me in the first part of
the Reagan Administration, and they knew how much I respected the
institution and the rule of law and the responsibility of the Justice
Department to be as non-partisan as possible and call them as straight as
possible. So I think that I had the benefit of some reservoir of good-will, so to
speak, when I came there. But I think that that’s also true for people that have
never been there. The people in that office are very very dedicated people
who are loyal to the service of the United States, and they know that they will
help the person who’s now the head of the office.
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MS. BESKE: What was the atmosphere like in the second Bush administration in
comparison to the Reagan administration?
MR. OLSON: The atmosphere?
MS. BESKE: Did it feel different? Sort of a generational change.
MR. OLSON: I haven’t thought about this very much. The times were completely different.
The Reagan administration coming in was almost considered sort of
revolutionary. The George W. Bush administration in a sense was a
somewhat continuation or somewhat linear with the Reagan and George H.
W. Bush administrations. And some of the people were the same. Harking
back to those times, there were some similarities. But then there were things
that happened during the time that I was there in the George W. Bush
administration that changed the complexion of everything of course. John
Ashcroft was a very, very fine Attorney General in my opinion, and I think in
everybody’s opinion who was working there. He was very straight shooter.
He went out of his way to visit with and talk to the people in the various
components of the Justice Department. He’s a very good man. And the other
people holding other positions, the Deputy Attorney General, the Associate
Attorney General, the heads of the various litigating divisions and so forth
were outstanding people. And the people at the FBI and so forth were
outstanding people. So the integrity of the department I thought was along
those same lines. That we have the responsibility to the American people to
enforce the laws fairly and as reasonably as we could.
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MS. BESKE: So that summer, then, obviously though the Supreme Court was not sitting,
you were and with your staff of twenty, super busy on merits briefs and in
anticipation of the upcoming sittings. Was the Supreme Court calling for the
views of the Solicitor General throughout the summer or did they wait until
after the big summer meeting?
MR. OLSON: No. Those orders come out after the meeting unless something unusual
happens, and I don’t think anything happened. So they’re pretty quiet.
They’re receiving lots of materials. They’re dealing with death penalty issues
and emergencies and things like that. But it was a nice time in the sense that I
was able to get up to speed. I was able to learn my job. Look at the cases that
were coming. I had to deal immediately with these appeal recommendations.
Like I said, there are about eight or ten a day that you have to do. If you don’t
do them right then and there when they come into the office or shortly
thereafter, it’ll pile up and you’ll never get caught up. So I did spend some
time at the place I have in Wisconsin, and I arranged for FedEx or UPS or
somebody to send me. I’d get a package every day, and I’d go through that
material and I’d sign my name and send it back with the next courier that was
coming. But it did give me a chance to look at the docket, learn the job, read
some more about. I’d read a lot about the history of the Solicitor General’s
office during that time I was going through the confirmation process. I did
have an opportunity to get up to speed.
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MS. BESKE: That’s great. Okay, so now I want to segue to 9/11. Which obviously you’ve
spoken about in detail before, but I think it would probably be useful to go
through it. If you’re comfortable.
MR. OLSON: Yes.
MS. BESKE: So September 10th you and Barbara had dinner, and she delayed her
departure so that she could wake up on your birthday, Tuesday morning.
MR. OLSON: Yes. Barbara was a commentator on television a lot. I can’t remember
exactly when some of this was happening, but even during that summer she
was on CNN a lot. Larry King really liked her. I think before her death she
had been fifty or more times on his show. And CNN and one or more of the
other networks were sending satellite trucks up to our place in the woods in
Wisconsin so Barbara could shoot her mouth off, express her opinions and so
forth. But we were back in Washington and gearing up for my upcoming
work, and she was engaged in her work. And my birthday is on September
11th as you noted, and she had been asked to go out to Los Angeles. She was
working with a law firm, and she was also acting as a commentator. So she
had been asked to go out to Los Angeles to be on the Bill Maher show, and
she didn’t want to leave on the tenth because of my birthday on the eleventh,
and I told her that it would be okay with me. But she decided that she wanted
to leave on the morning of the eleventh, so she changed her flight.
MS. BESKE: So she left before you woke up?
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MR. OLSON: No. I always get up pretty early and get to the office, and she was still there.
Her flight was at like eight o’clock or something like that. But I had left
before she left to go. As I recall. Yes I know that. I had left before she left.
MS. BESKE: So you were out quite early?
MR. OLSON: I usually am on my way before six in the car because coming in from Great
Falls, if you wait until the traffic builds up, it takes a lot of extra time. So I
always try to get going pretty early. I had left at, I don’t know 5:30, 5:45 –
something like that.
MS. BESKE: Okay. So you were at the office. Do you recall what you were doing that
morning?
MR. OLSON: Yes. The Solicitor General’s office was being used by the Attorney General
because the Attorney General’s office – the whole building over there was in
the process of being brought up to speed, refurnishing so to speak, painting
stuff like that. So the Attorney General was occupying the SG’s office. I was
over at another office on Pennsylvania Avenue. So I was in that office, suite
of offices, just working away.
MS. BESKE: Preparing for upcoming arguments? I guess you were about three weeks
away from the start of the Term.
MR. OLSON: Yes, and doing the regular stuff and work and dealing with all the issues.
Because there’s constantly things, you know, decisions that you need to make
in addition to preparing for arguments. Helping your assistants and the
deputies prepare for their arguments, looking at the briefs that are being filed.
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There’s stuff going on all the time. It’s amazing amount of work. So I was
doing that. I can’t remember exactly what I was working on.
MS. BESKE: Okay, so Barbara’s plane took off at 8:20 a.m. from Dulles. Did you talk with
her before by phone before the plane took off?
MR. OLSON: I can’t remember.
MS. BESKE: Okay. Let’s see. It is at 8:46 a.m. that the first plane American Airlines flight
11 out of Logan hits the North Tower. Do you recall hearing about that? Or
how you heard?
MR. OLSON: There was an anteroom for my secretary, my then-secretary Helen Voss. She
had worked for me for a number of years here, and then she went with me to
the Justice Department. And then I had an office behind the anteroom, and
then there was a private office beyond that where I had a television set, and I
don’t know what it was, a table or something like that. And she, Helen, came
in and said, “turn the television on,” something has happened. A plane hit the
World Trade Center. I can’t remember the words alerted me to the fact that
something awful was happening. And so I went back to that back room and
turned on the television and was seeing it all unfold. You know at that point
the first plane had hit that North Tower I guess.
MS. BESKE: Did you know at that point that it was a commercial airliner? I recall myself
initially thinking it must have been some dreadful accident involving a small
plane.
MR. OLSON: I think I probably felt the same thing. I think the reporting was unclear but of
course we were all, I’m sure everybody else was too, riveted to it. Once you
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got in front of the television set you were riveted to the television set, and
over time – I can’t remember the sequence – we began to learn that it was a
commercial plane. And at some point, I can’t remember the time, the second
one hit.
MS. BESKE: 9:03 a.m., so really just seventeen minutes had elapsed. And assuming it took
a few minutes for us to turn on our TVs, there really wasn’t a big interval at
all. When the second plane hit, it was then, of course, when it became all too
clear.
MR. OLSON: Yes, and so I saw whatever the rest of the American people saw with respect
to those planes. Once I realized that those were commercial planes, I was
very worried about Barbara’s flight because I knew she was on a commercial
plane. I can’t remember whether I did anything about that, but I do know that
I was instantly very concerned. Helen then came in and said Barbara was on
the phone. My first reaction was enormous relief that Barbara was okay. We
didn’t know where those New York flights had originated, at least I don’t
recall knowing. So I don’t know whether we knew that those were planes
from New York or Boston or anything. But I was worried that she was on a
plane and that this terrible thing was happening with commercial planes.
MS. BESKE: At this point were you worried that she was on one of the planes that had hit
the towers? Or were you worried at the scale or the possible magnitude of the
incident?
MR. OLSON: I hadn’t even, as I recall it, I hadn’t started to think about that. I was worried
that she was on a plane, and so when Helen patched her through, I was
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relieved. My first instinct was to be relieved to hear her voice and to know
that she was okay and that she wasn’t on those planes. And then she told me
that her plane had been hijacked and that she had been upgraded to first class
or something like that and she and all the other passengers had been herded
to the back of the airplane.
MS. BESKE: Was she calling on her cellphone or on the air phone?
MR. OLSON: You know I don’t know.
MS. BESKE: I’m sure that was not your first thought.
MR. OLSON: No, I couldn’t and I didn’t think about that, and I’ve now forgotten what
we’ve subsequently learned about the cellphones and airplane phones those
days. I do recall, as I sit here, your memories trick you so I’m just telling you
what my memory is today, thinking how in the world did Barbara make this
phone call. I learned then or subsequently that she had called collect to the
Department of Justice. How she managed to make the phone call and then get
through the Department of Justice’s elaborate network and get to my office
and then get me, I don’t know. I’m going to have to go back some day and
sort of reconstruct some of this. My heart sunk, of course, when she told me
that she had been hijacked, and at some point I told her, I had to tell her,
about the other two planes because then I realized that this is hideous, this is
another airplane, and god knows what was going on. But I knew that this was
going to be, or undoubtedly was going to be, tragic.
MS. BESKE: Do you recall how you told her?
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MR. OLSON: I told her. Because I had to tell her, you know what I mean. But she was sort
of in a fighting spirit. She wanted to know. She said what should I do? I
learned from her that they had used box cutters and or knives. I remember
box cutters because I had used those when I was a kid boxing groceries. I
asked her where the plane was and she didn’t know what direction – you
know, who would. She didn’t know what direction they were going in or
where they were or anything like that. We know now that the plane went
west quite a ways and then circled back. But she didn’t know that. So I was
trying to get whatever information I could so that I could convey it to
somebody. And then the line went dead.
MS. BESKE: Boy, what’d you do then?
MR. OLSON: Well, first thing I did was ask Helen to get me the command center, we had a
command center. I wanted to tell somebody that her flight, American Airlines
what was it, 77?
MS. BESKE: Flight 77.
MR. OLSON: Flight 77 had been hijacked. I wanted to get that information to somebody
because the television didn’t know what the hell was going on. So I talked to,
I don’t know, I talked to somebody, and then Helen came back in, and the
FBI report and so forth had the records of the times of these calls. And then
Barbara got back through again. And this was a shorter, this was a shorter
call. And I can’t remember exactly other than I love you kind of
conversations. And then it went dead again.
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MS. BESKE: My notes say that on that second call she asked you amongst other things,
“What should I tell the pilots?”
MR. OLSON: Yes.
MS. BESKE: Do you recall how you responded? First of all that implied the pilots were in
the back with her.
MR. OLSON: Either that or somebody on the flight crew. She said something like that, and
I said I don’t know. That’s maybe when I asked where she was. In what
direction are you going? I asked her some details about the people, but I
don’t remember all those details. I do remember the box cutters business and
I do remember that particular remark and the fact that they were herded to the
back of the plane.
MS. BESKE: What did she tell you about the hijackers?
MR. OLSON: I can’t remember. It’s either in one of those reports or what. But I don’t
remember. I don’t remember whether I asked who they were or anything like
that. I didn’t. I don’t think I asked that. I don’t think she told me much about
the hijackers. I just don’t recall.
MS. BESKE: It wasn’t an immediate conclusion in the minds of many in America that
what we were dealing with was sort of an Al-Qaeda type thing. I imagine
there was a lot of confusion and uncertainty.
MR. OLSON: Well, yes, but that didn’t last long. But in my mind it was clearly an act of
coordinated terrorism. That was in my mind. And I knew when that plane,
when that phone went dead the second time, I thought maybe that was it the
plane had been blown up or the plane had crashed or something like that.
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And I think that’s exactly what happened because it was not long after that
someone reported smoke coming from the Pentagon. And then there were,
this is my recollection now, so it could be inaccurate, reports that there may
have been an explosion at the Pentagon or a small plane had flown into the
Pentagon. And of course that piece of news, to the extent that I heard that and
I think I did, that was encouraging. But I didn’t believe it. I believed that that
had to be her plane. But I didn’t know, of course. And then of course it was
reported, and this unfolded minute after minute, that it was a commercial
plane. And I was positive in my mind, maybe I was just dreading what was
actually true, that that was the plane Barbara was on. I mean it was in
Washington. I had Helen and or myself call family. We got in touch with my
mother somehow, my son, my daughter, Barbara’s family. I wanted to alert
people that I thought Barbara had been a part of this terrible thing that was
unfolding.
MS. BESKE: So this is before the point where it was confirmed that it was American
Airlines flight 77?
MR. OLSON: Yes, absolutely.
MS. BESKE: But at the point at which you were pretty sure it was commercial?
MR. OLSON: I was worried. I was dreading that that was the case. But I didn’t know. But I
was saying, I don’t know. My memory is that we tried to alert members of
my family and Barbara’s family and maybe a friend or two of hers or
somebody. I can’t remember who all we called. But there was nothing to do
other than sit there and watch television. I just felt that’s all I could do. I
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made some more attempts to get in touch with Justice Department people so
that we could communicate what little I knew.
MS. BESKE: So you were sitting in this back office with Helen, with others?
MR. OLSON: Pretty much by myself. They were out in front. I didn’t really, I didn’t
encourage company.
MS. BESKE: Sure.
MR. OLSON: But there was a television out there, too. I was pretty much by myself.
MS. BESKE: At what point did you learn confirmation that the American Airlines flight
was what had hit the Pentagon?
MR. OLSON: I don’t remember. Somewhere along here the government told everybody to
get out of Washington. And I didn’t. I didn’t go anywhere because I wanted
to stay in tune with what was happening on television. And I’d look out the
street and it was just gridlock everywhere. There were no cars even moving.
And I knew I couldn’t stand that. I waited until the afternoon sometime, one
or two o’clock when traffic cleared up enough. I can’t even remember how I
got home. But I didn’t go out, I didn’t try to go out over the bridges that I
normally would’ve gone out because if you wanted to go towards Virginia
and you went over… I just anticipated that if I tried to go over one of those
bridges, I would go nowhere because the Pentagon was out there. So I went
north and north and north and somehow I got across a bridge and went home.
By that time a few people were already at my home.
MS. BESKE: So that day as you sat at the office were you just in shock? Were you on the
phone most of the day? Were you just sitting in front of the TV?
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MR. OLSON: I mean, yes. It was all of those things. Shock. Huge shock. That affects your
memory and it deadens your instincts a little bit or sharpens some and
deadens others. I don’t know. I was there pretty much by myself because
everybody had gone, you know. Everybody that I knew was in the Solicitor
General’s office, which was that suite of offices on Pennsylvania, was gone,
so I was by myself, which was probably the best thing. I did spend some time
on the phone trying to touch base with people. I guess just to do something.
MS. BESKE: So who was home when you got home? You said a few folks.
MR. OLSON: My son had gotten there.
MS. BESKE: Was he local?
MR. OLSON: Yes, he worked at that point for some … well he lives out in Ashburn and I
can’t remember who he was working for. But he had gotten there. My friend
Bob McConnell, who had been an Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan
administration, was there. Wasn’t very long after that that Clarence Thomas
and Ginni showed up. They were close to Barbara. And I can’t remember
people. Barbara Comstock and Barbara Olson were virtually twins, you know
they were engaged in a lot of these things together starting at the House
Government Reform Oversight Committee. And other people showed up as
the day wore on. I mean lots of people showed up and people brought food.
We opened up bottles of wine and we told stories about Barbara because by
that time, people knew that it was flight 77, and Barbara’s name was the first
name and picture that they flashed on the television screens, because of so
many television appearances by Barbara. People all over the United States
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knew who she was. And so they flashed up pictures of her on Meet the Press
or Larry King, you know that kind of logo that he had in the background.
There was her picture and so people, everybody in this area who was
watching television knew that Barbara had been on that plane. She was the
best-known victim out in the general public, and because I had been involved
in Bush v. Gore and this confirmation process, the two of us were well
known. At any rate, people were showing up in the backyard and we started
to just tell Barbara stories and talk about Barbara, because you can’t just
weep you know. What do you do?
MS. BESKE: Do you recall the next week?
MR. OLSON: Finally people left. You know people dribbled out. And I think maybe my
son and maybe somebody else stayed overnight. But anyway I went up to
bed, late in the evening, and I found a note from Barbara that she had left in
my closet – no, it was on the pillow, it was on the pillow. So she left after I
did and wrote this note: I’ll be back soon, I love you. You know that sort of
thing. I was getting a lot of help; Mary Ellen Bork was there and Barbara
Ledeen and well I’ll think of more names but….
MS. BESKE: The Silbermans.
MR. OLSON: The women particularly start somehow doing things. You know somebody
was answering the phone, and somebody was doing such and such. And I
think Bob McConnell and my son and somebody else whose name I’ll think
of did a lot of answering of the phones. Because the phone was ringing all the
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time and I didn’t want, I just couldn’t do it, you know. I couldn’t talk to
people.
MS. BESKE: Just people communicating their condolences?
MR. OLSON: Yes. People called. God bless them. You can’t just, with something like that
it just is a deluge. It was a deluge for days. The first thing that I think we
were focusing on was getting, because all the airlines, all air traffic was shut
down nationwide and so we got going on projects. We had a memorial
service on Saturday or Sunday at a Catholic church in McLean, I think.
Barbara was a Catholic, so Mary Ellen and that group were putting that
together. I don’t know how they did it. We put something together at our
home for Friday where people came over. Must’ve been a hundred or so
people came over, and Barbara Comstock got, the names are escaping me
now, someone to put together a ten-minute video of Barbara’s television
appearances and tributes to Barbara.
MS. BESKE: All of this in just the four or five days after 9/11? Wow.
MR. OLSON: Yeah, this was unbelievable. And it’s a beautiful piece with music and
everything. A professional put it together. Clips from her appearances, clips
from her appearing on shows during Bush v. Gore. It was amazing. We had
to get to work immediately on how in the world we would get my family and
Barbara’s family to Washington, when you couldn’t get on airplanes. We had
two sets of friends who somehow – I think Bob McConnell helped a lot with
this – got airplanes that could fly into Washington D.C. Private. Private jets.
How they got permission to do that I don’t know. Because one of them
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collected my family in California and my daughter in Arizona, and then came
here, or maybe picked up some of Barbara’s family.
MS. BESKE: Where was Barbara’s family?
MR. OLSON: In Texas. And how they managed to do that, I don’t know. But they got my
family, I think everybody from my family, my mother, my three sisters, my
brother, a couple of in-laws, and then Barbara’s family here.
MS. BESKE: It must have been so difficult for them when they couldn’t immediately drop
everything and get to you.
MR. OLSON: Yes. You know I didn’t even think about that. But somehow we did get these
private jets to do this. So they were here then. And then some people
managed, who happened to be on the east coast, or were travelling and on the
east coast, or were somewhere in the vicinity, drove and showed up. So there
was a huge, immense crowd at this service on Saturday, I think it was
Saturday. You know they arranged speakers, and Mary Ellen got people to
sing. You know, it was a really beautiful service. And then I was asked to
appear on television to talk about 9/11, you know it was sort of one of those
things that everybody in America was devastated by, and concerned about
and panicked by and all that stuff. I had to make a decision whether I was just
going to not do that or do it. And I decided that since I was a part of this
administration, I was going to be engaged in responding to this, and because
Barbara was on everybody’s mind because her picture was on and on and on,
and people knew who the two of us were. And I thought well, okay, I can
perform something, I have sort of a duty to do. I don’t know whether that’s
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being too self-important or what. I felt a sort of sense of responsibility also to
myself, I mean it’s catharsis too, you can’t just not talk about these things,
and you have to talk about them. So I went on several different programs and
described Barbara and described how we in this country were not going to
surrender and that kind of thing. So I did several shows. I had originally been
contacted by Larry, well everybody. But I told Larry King’s people no. And
then once I had decided to do I think Barbara Walters or something like that,
then I called up Larry King’s people and I said, I’m doing this other one and
I’ll do yours, because you were so good to Barbara. So I did that one. I did a
couple of others.
MS. BESKE: I’m sure there was a lot of investigatory interest in getting information from
you about the chronology of the calls and precisely the information that she
was able to communicate.
MR. OLSON: I did get that. I think I must’ve talked to FBI-type people. I did later I know
also. So then I went back to work on the following Monday or Tuesday.
Because again, I thought it was important for myself, but it was also
important for the office for me to get in there. And pull everybody together
and say we are not going to be devastated. We’ve got a job to do and we are
going to do it. We are going to come together. We’re going to support one
another. I need you to help me and I need all of us to be working together.
It’s a small enough family. And we’ve got a responsibility. The Court was
going to have its first argument on the first Monday, whatever day that was. I
had my first argument as Solicitor General, I think it was on the 10th, the 2nd
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week of the first two weeks of October. And I was determined to do it
because you have to do the first one sometime. And the sooner you do the
first one, then it’s not as hard to do the second one. That’s my theory. I was
determined that we were going to proceed.
MS. BESKE: Were you able to focus? Was it hard?
MR. OLSON: Very, very hard, but yes. Again how is your day going to be used? If you sit
there waiting for this all to go away, it’s not going to go away. So I did feel
that it’s important to accept the love and help that you get from friends and
family and to cry, to put one’s arms around people and vice versa. People
around you need that. You do no service to your family or friends if you
become a basket case. But you’re better off for yourself and everybody who
cares about you if you sort of struggle back onto your feet. Anyway, that’s
my feeling about it. I still feel that way, that the more I was studying
telecommunications and Antitrust Law, which is this very complicated case
that I had that involved the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and it was an
extraordinary complicated issue. The more I was able to focus on that, then
the day would go by.
MS. BESKE: And then socially I assume your millions of friends were taking care of you
on Friday nights and Saturday nights.
MR. OLSON: Oh every night. Probably every night. I don’t think anybody left me alone too
much. Not that I was in danger or anything like that. But I think that people
intuitively know that you need society, you need the comfort of and the
warmth, the support of people. Members of my family stayed in my house in
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Great Falls for a while. And my son was available and good friends. I don’t
remember specifics of that too much, but yes I was well taken care of.
MS. BESKE: I guess let’s then segue to your work as Solicitor General. You, I believe,
personally argued twenty-six cases?
MR. OLSON: I think that’s right. I must’ve said that someplace.
MS. BESKE: And you won virtually every one?
MR. OLSON: No. I think probably about a fairly sizable percentage I think in the
neighborhood of 80%. 80-85%. But you’re the Solicitor General, and it
seemed important to win as many cases as possible. That’s what we do of
course. And it was the office, and it was the government and it seemed
important to be successful. But there are some of those cases you’re not
going to win. There are going to be cases that the Supreme Court took, or
even that you had to put before the Supreme Court, that have to be argued
and if they’re really the hardest ones, the Solicitor General should be the one
rather than someone from the office up there.
MS. BESKE: I read in one place, I think it was when you announced your retirement, or in
the aftermath, that McConnell v. FEC upholding the Constitutionality of the
McCain-Feingold Act was sort of among your proudest accomplishments.
With the benefit of hindsight, was that true?
MR. OLSON: Yes, I think that Paul Clement, who was my deputy, was absolutely
spectacular in that. When I was going through the confirmation process,
McCain-Feingold had passed or was in front of the Congress, and I was
asked repeatedly by the Senators whether I would as the Solicitor General
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defend the constitutionality of that major election campaign finance reform,
because there were many people that were saying it was unconstitutional and
the President shouldn’t sign it and so forth. My answer uniformly was yes,
because it’s our responsibility to defend the constitutionality of acts of
Congress, except in very narrow circumstances where it would be imprudent
to defend a law that was manifestly unconstitutional or intruded on the
presidency. I do remember Senator McConnell, who was adamantly opposed
to it, saying he was hoping that I wouldn’t defend it, or maybe that I could
send my worst lawyer. He later said, why didn’t you send your worst lawyer,
and I said I did – it was me. Paul Clement and I felt very heavy responsibility
to Congress whether we agreed with the legislation or not, and the President
had signed it. That we had a responsibility, and it was a major four-hour
argument, instead of one hour argument, and Paul did a spectacular job. He
took half of it and I took half of it. A lot of people didn’t think we were going
to win that one, but we did. Yes, I was proud that we fulfilled our duty to the
office and to the institution of our government.
MS. BESKE: Other cases, school vouchers, the Pledge of Allegiance case…
MR. OLSON: Yes, that Pledge of Allegiance case, it went off on standing — whether the
guy who had brought that case was…
MS. BESKE: The non-custodial parent, I believe.
MR. OLSON: Yes. Who argued it himself.
MS. BESKE: Interesting.
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MR. OLSON: Who actually did a fairly decent job given the fact that he was a lawyer but
he really hadn’t been practicing law, or something like that. He did a pretty
good job, but his standing problem was really serious. And they didn’t want
to get into the “under god” stuff. So that was one. I did one of the
Guantanamo cases, Rasul.
MS. BESKE: Yes, there was a trio of terrorism cases that came down just as you were
announcing your retirement from the position – Rasul, Hamdi, and Hamdan.
MR. OLSON: There were two that were similar sounding.
MS. BESKE: That’s right, yes. And then Rumsfeld v. Padilla.
MR. OLSON: Yes. But then that may have come after. I can’t remember, but one of the
things that was done early on once we got engaged in the fight against
terrorism — we knew that there were going to be lots of cases involving
habeas corpus issues and things like that. And the President and the Attorney
General asked that the management of all those cases be centralized in one
place in the Justice Department. And they asked the Solicitor General to be in
charge of that. Normally, cases circulating up in the District Courts of
California and South Carolina and New York, and so on and so forth, would
be handled by the U.S. Attorneys or other people, and you wouldn’t know for
sure that the workmanship was going to be uniformly consistent in terms of
what was being said, positions that were being taken, nuances, what might be
said in oral argument and so forth. So we took that over. And we had
meetings regularly with respect to terrorism with the State Department. We
had these big meetings in the Justice Department with the State Department,
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and the White House and the Defense Department, CIA, NSA, and the such
and such. This massive room full of people, and we talked about what we
were doing and who was doing what and all that. Paul Clement and Greg
Garre did a lot of the actual going-to-court stuff. Greg Garre did some things
in the District Court and Paul Clement did some things in the Circuit Court
and then when they got to the Supreme Court, I did Rasul. Which I think was
the first one, and then Paul did at least a couple of the next ones.
MS. BESKE: Did you feel a special responsibility given your personal connection to 9/11?
MR. OLSON: Well, I felt that it was important the Solicitor General be the one to be there.
Now, I recused myself from anything that actually involved people that had
been involved in the planning or execution of 9/11. Like the one of the guy
out here in Virginia. I recused myself from many of those. But otherwise I
got opinions from the appropriate people as to what I could and couldn’t do.
But I did feel a responsibility, this is the priority for the government for the
American people. And I felt that it was right that we centralize it in the lead
litigator in the appellate process in the office of the Solicitor General.
MS. BESKE: Other cases of significant note, the affirmative action cases – Gratz and
Grutter. And I believe you argued both of them, is that correct?
MR. OLSON: They were the same day. One followed the other. I think I did that twice,
where there were two closely related cases. The other one involved the
people that were put on lists because of sexual offenses, and due process
implications and other issues with being on those lists. So I did those two I
think the same day. And then I did Grutter and Gratz the same day as well.
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MS. BESKE: Were you surprised by the results there?
MR. OLSON: I wasn’t able to go quite as far as I wanted to go with the briefing in that case
because the President felt very strongly about the position we were taking.
And his counsel Al Gonzalez said that we could say the issues were: is
diversity in public college education as an end in itself legitimate, and does it
satisfy strict scrutiny, is it a compelling governmental interest? And if it is
then is the plan intended to serve that compelling governmental interest
sufficiently narrowly tailored that it doesn’t do more than address that
compelling government interest? I wanted to take the position, and I had a
lot of support in the administration including in the Civil Rights division, to
say diversity just standing alone is not a compelling governmental interest
sufficient to override prohibitions on race-based government decisions. For
all kinds of reasons I won’t get into here. The White House wanted to avoid
that question and wanted to say these programs are not sufficiently tailored.
They’re not well designed, they go too far, they’re too broad. After thinking
about that and agonizing about that, I thought the President had the perfect
right. He’s the President. It was perfectly appropriate for the President to
weigh in on that. So we wrote the brief that way, and that was the way it was
briefed and that was the way it was argued.
MS. BESKE: Do you think the President’s preference to go that route was a function of
where he thought the Supreme Court was willing to go?
MR. OLSON: I think that he didn’t want, I don’t know. I talked to lots of people but I didn’t
talk directly to him about it. I talked to the Vice President a lot. I think the
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President viscerally felt that this whole thing was difficult and important and
that diversity is an important value. Which I agree with. But if we didn’t have
to go all the way and say that diversity isn’t something that could be
considered then we shouldn’t. And that’s a prudent position to take. I thought
that we had to get this thing resolved one way or the other in the Supreme
Court, and we all felt that Justice O’Connor was going to be the pivotal
person in all of this. And if we didn’t give her a strong, supportive backing in
our briefs, then we’d never get her to do it. Why would she do it if we
weren’t going to do it? And of course it turned out that way. So we were
surprised, yes. I mean the decision finding one part of the University of
Michigan system designed to accomplish the same purpose by the same
Board of Regents was constitutional and one wasn’t constitutional. And then
the idea that, well, we’ll just go along with these kinds of programs for
twenty-five years and then it won’t be necessary to do it anymore seemed a
very mushy outcome. And of course there were opinions all over the place.
And there were opinions starting with the Bakke case, and the Kentucky and
Seattle cases, and as late as Fisher case and so forth where the individual
Justices – I counted it up once – issued close to thirty different majority,
concurring, and dissenting opinions. Every Justice weighs in on this so no
one in any school knows exactly what to do except try to get around any
restriction that exists. It’s something that’s very difficult. That was the
outcome.
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MS. BESKE: It’s interesting, having had two of my children apply to college – the mantra
that you read about all over the place now is “holistic decision making.” No
single criterion and everything. One wonders whether the Supreme Court
didn’t just prescribe a closed door or star-chamber dialogue.
MR. OLSON: What they did was prescribed something like Justice Stewart once said about
pornography: “I know it when I see it.” So they prescribed that. For years
when the University of California (I went to Boalt Hall Law School at
Berkeley) would ask me for money, I would say, are you still discriminating
on the basis of race in your admissions? And they wouldn’t tell me they
weren’t, so I would just not send a check. Now I do. But someone told me
that at these educational institutions, we can do what we want.
MS. BESKE: Interesting. As Solicitor General how did you prepare for oral argument?
What was your typical routine?
MR. OLSON: I tried to prepare as hard as I could. I knew that you had no excuse to be other
than fully prepared for oral arguments. That meant that I read the briefs, I
took notes. I read the cases. I would have binders prepared of all the briefs.
And I have two sets of binders prepared. One set I can take home and work
on the weekends without schlepping it back and forth, with all the briefs,
memos if I could get them on different issues, the cases – and I would write
summaries of the cases and I would have questions and answers prepared, a
combination of myself and the people working on it. And I would have a
memo prepared at the end by someone in the office that analyzed each Justice
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and how each Justice would go about analyzing this particular case and how
they were likely to vote and why. We’d have two or three moot courts.
MS. BESKE: All within the office?
MR. OLSON: Yes. Now here in private practice we’ll go someplace, we’ll go to
Georgetown or the Chamber of Commerce or another law firm or something
like that for one of the moots. But as I recall, all the ones done by the
Solicitor General’s office are pretty much there. Once in a while they might
invite somebody in who has a companion case. For example, I went over
there from private practice to sit in on the moot courts that Don Verrilli did
for the marriage cases. Or the ones that I was involved in and they came over
here. In the Solicitor General’s office, by and large, there might be
exceptions but I can’t recall any that were not internal. But I would work as
hard as I possibly could. I would be up early in the morning of arguments
still trying to think of what can I add to this that can nail it. Is there an
analogy that I can think of? Some way to look at the question that I can think
of that just might make the difference. You keep trying until you can’t try
anymore.
MS. BESKE: Some Justices, notably Justice Alito, have said oral argument makes no
difference whatsoever. What is your take on that?
MR. OLSON: Well other Justices have said that it does.
MS. BESKE: Like Scalia.
MR. OLSON: Yes. And Kennedy. All the ones I’ve ever talked to. I haven’t specifically
talked to Justice Alito about that. And I don’t think that at the end of the day
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he really means that. He might think or he might believe, and this is the basis
for what he is saying, is the decision, the judgment, may not be changed as a
result of oral argument. Although other Justices have said that there have
been circumstances where it has. But the way it’s written and how far it goes
and the scope of the decision, and the tone of the decision, and the tone of the
dissent, and the tone of the concurring opinion may be influenced by oral
arguments. Some people, conventional wisdom for whatever its worth, will
say that you can’t win but you could lose something, you could make a
mistake, and you could give something away. I have seen things said in oral
argument, and I can remember a couple of cases where arguments that I
articulated in the oral arguments were cited in the opinion. The library case,
United States v. American Library Association, which was the pornography
on the computers in the library. I think that something that I said in oral
argument was cited in the opinion.
MS. BESKE: Something that hadn’t been expressed in a brief?
MR. OLSON: Yes. It was an answer to a question. But it was something that we had
covered, I can’t remember what it is now, but something we had covered in
moot court. In the case involving the Census, it was whether Utah or North
Carolina would get that 1 seat at the margin. And there was a statute that
prohibited something called statistical enumeration. So what happens when
you go out and take the Census and the people aren’t there. The statute
doesn’t want whole streets or whole communities to say well most of the
people, the 10% that we talked to, the 10% of the houses that we visited,
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showed that there were that many people. Let’s multiply that by the number
of something else. We wanted to defend what the Census department had
done because they had done something like that extrapolation. But I wanted
to distinguish between what the statute prohibited and what the statute
permitted. So I thought of this, this was one of those six o’clock in the
morning things. How can I explain the difference? And Justice Breyer asked
me this question related to that subject and I said you couldn’t go, like if you
were to go count the books in your library, you couldn’t count one shelf and
multiply it by the number of shelves and come up with how many books you
had in your library. That would not be permitted. But if you went down the
shelf and, say the U.S. reports each one is about two inches thick, and all of a
sudden you had a space, it was reasonable to conclude that some Justice was
looking at that particular book, and you could determine or make an analysis
or an extrapolation that that was a book in your library. So you were making
it count so that you could do that sort of thing. That was a four-one-four
decision, which we won. And that was in the opinion. Now I’m not saying it
would have come out any differently, but they have oral argument, and
whatever you do you don’t want to just say, well go ahead and decide it
anyway – I know you’ve made up your mind. So you have to do the best you
can to have an impact. I spent an enormous amount of time just on the first
sentence or two to try to frame what I call the prism through which I want
them to see the case. There’s lots of ways you could take every case before
the court and look at it in a slightly different way. Everybody, anybody
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engaged in the art of argumentation, will tell you, well, if I can define the
question, I can decide the outcome. You sort of want to decide or articulate
the question, and if you do that successfully at the beginning of the oral
argument and if you do it properly and very carefully, that will elicit the first,
second, third, fourth question, and maybe they’ll travel down this way. So
maybe this is just a game that we engage in but I think that that analysis is
correct.
MS. BESKE: Is there any Justice or has there been any Justice whose questions you tend to
dread?
MR. OLSON: No. What I would dread is if they don’t ask questions. If they don’t ask
questions you don’t know what’s on their minds. If they ask really hard
questions, that’s good. Because you know there’s going to be hard questions.
You don’t get to the Supreme Court if they’re easy. You want them to ask
questions. And each of them asks questions in a different way. It’s really kind
of fun to see the different ways in which they ask questions. You can almost
see what’s going through their minds when they’re asking these questions.
And if you do that memo that I talked about, analyze each Justice for the
particular case, you can almost sense where they are going to be coming from
when that question is asked. Now that’s not perfect, and you never know for
sure. But I think they’re all very smart people, and they work very hard to ask
very penetrating questions. I’m thrilled by the opportunity when I get one to
do that.
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MS. BESKE: So you announced your retirement on June 24, 2004, was that always your
plan? Is that sort of how it goes, you go for a term?
MR. OLSON: You don’t want to quit in the middle of a term because there’s a lot of
unfinished business. You wrote those briefs and you have responsibility for
them. When I was interviewed by the transition team asking me how long I’d
be willing to serve, because every President wants to appoint people that are
going to stay there for a while, I said I don’t think you should ever appoint
anybody who’s not going to be willing to be there at least two years. And on
the other hand at the outside would be I would think four years. So this was
three. I still wanted to do it but that whole 9/11 business and Barbara’s death
and the income hit that you take, especially if you go from private practice,
led me to feel that it was time to go. I’m not saying that it’s poverty when
you’re being paid that much by the government. But it’s a big difference.
And as you get older and towards the time that you’re going to have to rest
on what you’ve earned, I thought it was time for those and other reasons to
get back to private practice. And it was three years.
MS. BESKE: I think we’ve got enough time to talk about you meeting Lady.
MR. OLSON: Okay. Well, that was a very big highlight of my life. After 9/11 and
becoming a widower, the other thing that I felt – in addition to going back to
work – is that you’ve got one life to live, and I didn’t agree with the people
that thought, not that anybody lectured me or anything, that you should be in
mourning for a year or anything like that. I don’t believe in that. So I
engaged in social activities. Going out to dinner and dating a bit, and my
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mother even told me in December when we buried Barbara – because it took
a while for all that process to play itself out and her remains to be identified –
she said you should have a social life. And so she took me aside. She’s
turning ninety-seven in May. I listened to her. But that’s not the only reason.
I just felt it’s what you need and everybody’s different. Sometime in early
spring of the year, a mutual friend said I’ve got someone that you should
meet. She’s fantastic. She’s intelligent. She’s a lawyer. She’s beautiful. She’s
smart. You will love her in every possible way. And then at the same time, I
didn’t know this, but someone else invited me to the Kentucky Derby. And
someone in Kentucky wanted someone to be a companion at the Derby, they
unbeknownst to us were contacted, each of us and asked, would you be
interested. This happy coincidence of circumstance put us together in April
just before the Kentucky Derby and at the Derby. I was amazed because
people will tell you this person is just fantastic and shoots the moon and so
on. And then when you actually meet, you might be disappointed. But in
Lady’s case she was more than anything I could ever have possibly imagined.
MS. BESKE: That’s amazing. I read somewhere that when she was approached and told,
hey you’ve got to meet Ted Olson, she pulled out her videos of Bush v. Gore
and said ‘Oh my god he’s Bush not Gore! This is not going to work.’ So you
came from sort of different political backgrounds, and how did that work?
MR. OLSON: Right. Well she Googled me and found out and told her friend, I don’t think
that’s going to work. But it hasn’t been anything like the impediment that one
might think. It’s good for people to have different perspectives as long as you
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don’t take it so personally that you’re angry because this person supports that
political view or that candidate or something like that. I mean it can be very
boring if everybody did that. Now Barbara was very conservative and we
were pretty much lined up that way. But Lady is just a fascinating person,
and she’s got a tremendous intellectual curiosity. So we can debate things up
to a point you know. I don’t try to convince her. And I think that some people
may think that she’s had a very good influence on me, and maybe so. It’s
worked out fine. Great.
MS. BESKE: So you were engaged in October 2005.
MR. OLSON: Yes. I think that’s right. I know the wedding date because we just celebrated
our tenth anniversary.
MS. BESKE: And I think I read you were married exactly one year after your engagement
to the day?
MR. OLSON: Very close. Well, yes, I think I’ve read that too. I haven’t gone back, that’s
why I hesitated when you mentioned the exact date of the engagement. I
think that Lady has said that that is correct. It’s very close.
MS. BESKE: Do you recall, well of course you recall, tell me about your engagement. The
circumstances of your engagement.
MR. OLSON: We had started dating in 2002, so this was 2005 and we had been living
together. So we were up in our place in Wisconsin and I did some research
and acquired a ring and one night up there I presented her with the ring. And
fortunately she was happy to receive it.
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MS. BESKE: That’s great. So you were married one year later at Meadowood Resort in
Napa Valley, California and Judge Silberman performed the ceremony.
MR. OLSON: Yes.
MS. BESKE: And you had about 300 guests. I read it was like a who’s who of the
Washington legal establishment.
MR. OLSON: We hadn’t thought of it quite that way. We invited the people that we knew.
Some people like small weddings, and there’s very good reasons for that, but
we were very very happy to invite people to help us celebrate that day. And
the place that we were having it – you can’t do better than Napa Valley, and
you can’t really find a better place on the planet other than Meadowood. It is
such a beautiful place. So we had friends and family from California and
Lady’s family from Kentucky. So lots of people would come just for the
event you know. To take a long weekend and do something like that. So we
decided what the heck we’re going to you know invite lots of people. And
lots of people were able to come which was nice.
MS. BESKE: That’s great. I think we’ll stop now.
