Politics & Power Quote by Ted Olson

Grief is being managed here the way Washington manages everything else: by widening the frame until it becomes civic. Ted Olson is speaking as a man hit personally by national catastrophe (his wife, Barbara Olson, died on 9/11), yet his language keeps tugging the moment away from the private and toward the institutional. The first clause is telling: he leads with the calls from President Bush and Vice President Cheney, as if the highest validation of his pain is that it has been witnessed by power. Those calls function as both comfort and credential, folding a personal loss into the state’s narrative machinery.

Then comes the pivot that does the real work: “other people… suffering every bit as much as I am.” It’s humility on the surface, but also a moral equalizer that disciplines grief into public purpose. He’s refusing the right to be singular, which is a deeply American move in crisis: the insistence that individual anguish must be converted into collective resolve. “Our whole nation is going through a tragedy together” isn’t just solidarity; it’s a cue for unity, the emotional precondition for the policy era that followed.

The sentence’s structure mirrors the psychological scramble of the moment: long, accumulating, slightly breathless, as if he’s stacking reasons not to fall apart. “I think we have to think about those things” sounds soft, almost banal, but it’s an instruction. Don’t linger in the ungovernable. Keep your mind on the shared story. In the early days after 9/11, that was comfort, strategy, and consent-building all at once.