Barbara Olson - Yenra

University of St. Thomas Alumna Barbara Olson Victim of Nation's Tragedy

Barbara OlsonBarbara Olson made a phone call to her husband before the hijacked plane she was in was slammed into the Pentagon. Former federal prosecutor Barbara Olson served as the Chief Investigative Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, where she spearheaded the investigation of the Clinton administration's travel office firings and eventually uncovered the explosive "filegate" scandal. She has also served as the Principal Assistant General Counsel and Solicitor to the House. A much sought-after legal analyst and commentator, she has appeared repeatedly on countless television and radio talk shows.

With great sadness, University of St. Thomas Alumni Association confirmed Wednesday the death of 1978 UST Alumna Barbara K. Olson. Mrs. Olson, 45, was a passenger aboard hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the U.S. Pentagon in Washington D.C. Tuesday, September 11.

Olson, wife of U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, was born on December 27, 1955, in Houston. After finishing her undergraduate work at UST, she later attended the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. A federal prosecutor, Chief Investigative Counsel to the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight during its probe into the Clinton Administration "Travelgate" scandal, she was most recently a legal analyst and commentator for CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNBC, and MSNBC. The New York Times best-selling author also wrote The Final Days: A Behind the Scenes Look at the Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House and Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In addition to her husband, Olson is survived by her brother, David Bracher, and her sister, Antoinette Lawrence, both of Houston.

The Final Days: A Behind the Scenes Look at the Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House - New York Times best-selling author Barbara Olson, whose Hell to Pay laid bare the sordid political deals of Hillary Rodham Clinton, now turns her razor sharp vision on the Clintons' shocking excesses in their final days of office: the outrageous pardons to political cronies and friends, the looting of the White House, the executive orders that were sheer abuses of presidential power, the presidential library that is becoming a massive boondoggle of vanity more appropriate to a Third World dictator, and much more. This was how the Clintons chose to end their occupation of the White House, in a story whose reverberations are still shaking the political landscape. Barbara Olson knows Washington politics from the inside -- with a depth of insight and fire-honed principled -- like few others. She has been an attorney with the Justice Department, a Congressional investigator, and a general counsel in the United States Senate. She knows the law. She knows the Constitution. She knows how power is meant to be responsibly exercised. In The Final Days she shows how the Clintons climaxed eight years of sleaze with a spree of payoffs and self-indulgence unprecedented in its vulgarity and possible illegality.

Hell to Pay : The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton - Hell to Pay is yet another book on Hillary Rodham Clinton, this time from a conservative lawyer who served as the Republican chief counsel for the congressional committee investigating the Clintons' involvement in "Travelgate" and "Filegate." Barbara Olson traces the now familiar biographies of the president and first lady, contending that Mrs. Clinton is someone with dangerously liberal, even radical, political beliefs who "now seeks to foment revolutionary changes from the uniform of a pink suit." (Olson plays the theme heavily: each chapter of Hell to Pay begins with quotes from Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, which influenced the young Hillary Rodham.) There are some interesting new tidbits scattered throughout the book, like the fact that after law school Hillary Rodham tried to become a Marine Corps officer but was turned down; or that she told her high school paper her ambition after high school was "to marry a senator and settle down in Georgetown." Olson, attempting to dissect the mystery of the Clinton partnership, writes, "Most self-respecting women would have left" after Clinton's repeated infidelities. "Hillary chose to stay. She behaves as both a desperate lover, and like a frantic campaign manager protecting a flawed candidate.... Hillary, it seems, long ago accepted Bill Clinton as someone who could advance her goals, as a necessary complement to her intellectual cold-blooded pursuit of power." As the Clinton presidency draws to a close, that pursuit has taken her beyond the White House toward a bid for her own U.S. Senate seat. Olson predicts the Senate won't be enough, just the next step toward becoming the first woman president: "Hillary Clinton seeks nothing less than an office that will give her a platform from which to exercise real power and real world leadership." While Olson admits that "Bill Clinton has always excited the greatest passion not among his supporters, but among his detractors," the same could certainly be said of his wife--whose supporters will probably consider Hell to Pay a rehash of a too-familiar story, but whose detractors will no doubt savor every page. --Linda Killian