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Barbara Olson - Impassioned in Life, Heroic In Death
by Mara Purl

September 12, 2001 The Polish Press, Krakow, Poland

Some may have questioned her politics, but everyone can agree on one thing about Barbara Bracher Olson - she died a hero.

Poised in the presence of brutal terrorists, calm in the face of almost certain death, she was determined to share any fragments of information she could in defiance of a secret plot to undermine the American way of life.

As her American Airlines flight 77 was diverted from its planned route to Los Angeles, she managed to use her cell phone to reach her husband. According to the Los Angeles Times, she calmly told him, "Our plane is being hijacked."

Though her phone went dead at about 9 a.m. Eastern time, she was able to place another call a few minutes later. Providing the only clues to what was actually happening on board the hijacked flight, she shared two key pieces of information: first, that "they" had huddled all the passengers and crew into the back of the plane; and second, that their weapons were "knives and cardboard box cutters." And then her phone went dead a final time.

Seconds later, her Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon, killing all 65 aboard, along with an as yet undetermined number of government employees at work in the nation's defense nerve center. A few blocks away, Ted Olson sat in his Justice Department office, where he'd just received the two calls from his wife.

She'd been scheduled to fly the previous day. She'd delayed her trip to spend the morning with her husband on the occasion of his sixty-first birthday.

The Olson's were a Washington D.C. "power couple," ambitious, accomplished, and sometimes controversial. Both were lawyers. Theodore Olson is Solicitor General, the constitutional lawyer who argued George W. Bush's election case before the Supreme Court. She was one of the congressional investigators of Travelgate and other Clinton administration scandals.

While Ted Olson made arguments for candidate Bush, Barbara Olson became a well known face on cable TV news programs. Camera-worthy in long, straight blond hair, sleek suits and spike heels, she delivered unrelenting Right-wing, and sometimes contrarian viewpoints, as was the case during the Clarence Thomas hearings.

Her vehement opposition to Hillary Rodham Clinton was vented in her book, published in November 1999, "Hell to Pay." "I believe it is important to understand who she is and what she intends to do if elected," Olson said of her book. Though the book generally earned praise from conservatives, many liberal readers claimed it was a vicious attack which showed more about the writer than about her subject.

Early in her career, Olson she was a federal prosecutor who became counsel to Senate Assistant Majority Leader Don Nickles (R-Oklahoma) as part of a fellowship she had taken during her last year at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York. Later she prosecuted drug cases as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Becoming more colorful as her career progress, Ms. Olson became known in inside circles for participating in telephone screaming matches with White House counsel Jane Sherburne, while Olson was a key investigator of two of the early Clinton White House scandals. More recently, she worked as a lobbyist in Washington for a Montgomery, Ala., law firm, Balch & Bingham..

The Olsons' was a life of hard work and glamour, their spacious Great Falls, Virginia home a magnet for guests from an "A-list" of highly placed Republicans. Today, admirers and detractors alike mourn the loss of a vibrant, impassioned American who died in the prime of her life.

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