The unsavory victim

Barbara Olson's bestselling hatchet job on Bill and Hillary Clinton is a shameful coda to a life that ended in bravery.

By Kerry Lauerman

Nov. 19, 2001 | It's tough reading a new book by a recently deceased author, particularly one, like Barbara Olson, who has quite understandably become a tragic hero in the eyes of many. Olson was among the passengers of American Airlines Flight 77, which was hijacked and flown into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Before the crash, she managed to call her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, twice on her cellphone, relaying bits of information about the hijacking -- it was from Olson that the world first learned about the use of "box cutters" as a weapon -- and asking his advice, he later recalled on "Larry King Live," about "what she should tell the pilot."

It's an unimaginable situation. And simply because of the way she kept her wits about her, Olson deserves to be honored for her ability to tough it out the best she could, making virtually the only record we have of what happened on that particular doomed ride.

It's not a huge surprise, of course, that Olson was tough. Anyone who had seen her on TV talk shows was quickly initiated to her partisan, take-no-prisoners style. Earlier in the year, she was a fixture on "Larry King Live," this summer as a daily critic of the conduct of Rep. Gary Condit. Olson, her intensely blond hair glowing, her teeth gleaming, would sometimes be beamed in from Wisconsin, speaking from what looked like a wood-paneled Moose Lodge's rec room. She'd be incongruously wearing some turtleneck and jacket ensemble as the rest of the country sweated through the summer's dog days.

A picture of Middle American piety, she savored the singular joy of bashing Condit. But she didn't stop there; Olson regularly raised the specter of Bill Clinton, arguing not only that he was somehow Condit's moral progenitor, but that as such he was also, somehow, culpable for the mysterious disappearance of Condit's intern lover, Chandra Levy.

It made for good, cathartic TV, something Olson had perfected for years after emerging as one of the blondest of the blond Republican warrior women, dominating TV talk in their quest to make Bill Clinton pay for his sins. Olson, a former federal prosecutor, had served as counsel to a congressional committee that looked into some of the earliest Clinton scandals, and she quickly parlayed that into multimedia success. Her book, the bestselling "Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton," was a chronicle of everything Hillary Clinton had ever done wrong -- and seemed to have done wrong -- delivered in a bitterly self-righteous tone. In the process, Olson became a major player in the Clinton TV circus, where telegenic partisans from both sides squared off nightly in tournaments of highly theatrical name-calling and the dimmest type of political discourse.

Now, Olson's last book, "Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House," released just in the month after her tragic death, has made her a posthumous bestselling author. "She had completed the book," explains publisher Alfred S. Regnery in a preface, "and we had completed the editorial and prepublication work on it the week before she died."

Next page: A thin, mean-spirited clip job