Leadership Quote by Ted Olson

The line lands with the half-smile cadence of someone trying to sound reasonable while quietly marveling at a minor act of willpower-as-force-of-nature. Olson frames Barbara not as merely determined but as almost procedurally unstoppable: "capable of doing practically anything if she set her mind to it" is a political spouse’s compliment that doubles as a warning label. It’s praise, but it’s also an admission that the usual rules - bureaucracy, etiquette, maybe even institutional friction - didn’t reliably apply to her.

The seemingly small detail about "getting collect calls through" does real work. Collect calls are a relic of a pre-smartphone world, when access was mediated by operators, policies, and gatekeepers. The subtext: Barbara didn’t just want contact; she would engineer contact. Olson chooses an unglamorous, almost comic logistical feat to make the point without sounding grandiose. He avoids mythmaking and instead offers an anecdote that feels verifiable, domestic, and therefore more persuasive.

"In retrospect, I'm not surprised" is the rhetorical tell: he’s rewriting the past from the vantage point of knowing exactly who she was. It’s a line about power that doesn’t announce itself as power. Coming from a politician, it’s also a quiet acknowledgment of how influence actually moves in public life: not only through speeches and offices, but through relentless initiative, an intuitive grasp of systems, and the confidence to press until the system yields.