Leadership Quote by Ted Olson

Grief rarely arrives as eloquence; it arrives as bargaining dressed up as logic. Ted Olson's stammering repetition of "I wanted" captures the mind's first defense after catastrophe: if you can re-run the facts often enough, maybe you can edit them. The sentence keeps restarting, as if restarting could change the outcome. It's not rhetorical flourish so much as psychological trace evidence, the sound of someone trying to negotiate with reality in real time.

The specificity of "her plane" matters. Planes are normally abstractions - flights, routes, numbers. Here the object becomes intimate property, a dreadful belonging. Olson's wish that she might have survived "because she was in the back" is a brutal little snapshot of how tragedy makes people reach for the crude physics of chance: proximity to impact, seat location, a survivable margin. It's the fantasy of contingency, the belief that death must have a loophole if you search hard enough.

Then comes the sentence that functions like a slammed door: "But we know that doesn't happen". The "we" expands private loss into public knowledge, reflecting the post-9/11 atmosphere in which personal grief was instantly nationalized. Olson, a political figure accustomed to argument and control, finds himself stating the only incontrovertible premise left: some events are beyond persuasion. "Those sorts of things" is understatement bordering on avoidance - the unspeakable reduced to a category, because naming it directly would make it too real. The power here is the collapse of a professional language-maker into the plain, helpless grammar of mourning.