Theodore "Ted" Bevry Olson

With deep love and poignancy, we honor the memory of Ted Olson, who passed away on November 13, 2024, in Fairfax County, Virginia, surrounded by his wife Lady and his children, Christine and Ken.  

Known as a lion of the law, a revered Supreme Court advocate and patriot who served two administrations, Ted was first a loving husband, son, father, grandparent, and great grandparent.  His personal charisma buttressed his effectiveness as lawyer and leader.  With reliable wit, Ted could charm with well-timed one-liners delivered in a baritone deep enough to make ribs rumble.  His lack of conceit, intellectual equanimity, and mentorship skills (active listening) endeared him to friends and colleagues across the spectrum of political affiliation, color and gender.  His Viking verve, tenacity and vitality lifted him and inspired all in his midst.  Like sharks who must swim or sink (a metaphor he often invoked), Ted propelled himself forward every day, pulling his own oar so strongly he inevitably carried others, even while going through challenge and personal pain. 

Ted will be forever admired and sorely missed by his family and friends, colleagues, mentees, and the many whose lives he touched.  His personal legacy will live on:  leadership through professional honor and integrity, strength through discipline, devotion garnered through consistently respectful treatment of others.  

Ted was born on September 11, 1940, in Chicago, first child of Yvonne Bevry and Lester W. Olson, both of Norwegian ancestors who settled in Door County, Wisconsin.  His mother Yvonne became a writer, poet and teacher.  His father Les became a career engineer with United Airlines, having started as a part-time employee, without a college degree, cleaning parts in United’s Chicago hub.  Les rose eventually to director of engineering overseeing plane maintenance for United.  During WWII the airline took the family from Chicago to Brooklyn, Cheyenne to California, settling in 1947 in the San Francisco Bay area, where United had established a maintenance hub. Ted spent his formative years in Los Altos, the heart of apricot orchards in the 50’s and 60’s, now Silicon Valley.  He was a member of the first graduating class of Los Altos High School.

Ted’s immediate family grew over the following seventeen years, with the addition of sisters Claudia, Kirstin and Joan, and brother John.  As the family grew, they travelled summers back to Door County, where, as a boy, Ted worked summers picking cherries with sister Claudia, alongside Jamaican migrant workers singing in the orchards.  Ted watched his grandfather Bevry milk the cows and tickle the backs of hogs with a long stick he had whittled specially to render such pleasure. 

Influences on Ted cohered with the strong example of his parents, grounded citizens with a marriage as rock solid as the Niagara escarpment under their native Door County.  Reared on the Sturgeon Bay dairy farm, Yvonne had learned discipline through the daily duties of her hardworking parents, stewards of livestock and pets of all variety.  Yvonne evolved to become a reader and writer of intellectual heft, driven by lifelong curiosity.  After raising her five children, Yvonne set to ghostwriting stories of her husband’s engineering feats as a teenager, which ranged from the assembly of an RCMP Harley from junkyard parts in a box he bought for $5… to the raising of a 100-foot radio antenna in the dirt of Door County during the Great Depression.  Les’s desire to communicate across the oceans persisted and eventually both he and Yvonne became ham radio enthusiasts. 

An engineer and cautious aviator who taught Ted to fly as a boy, Les cautioned against becoming a pilot hobbyist, likening to an “organ donor.”  Les taught his son forward motion, positivity… to strive, but always with intelligent caution, a lesson echoed by Ted’s future boss Ronald Reagan: “Trust but verify.”

Much was expected of the oldest child of Les and Yvonne, but perhaps not anticipated was the ferocity of his talent for verbal combat.  Ted Olson loved to argue.  His natural skill for debate evolved as an undergraduate at the University of the Pacific under the mentorship of a formidably charismatic debate coach, Paul Winters, who pursued candidates for debate who showed promise- but were often ignored or excluded in 1950’s America.  In Ted’s years, Coach Winters’ winning team included a Native American, two African Americans, one of whom was legally blind, and several women… a bold move for the times, one that empowered his appreciative students, heightening their potential, distilling it from the mash.  One of Ted’s teammates, Horace Wheatly, made a lasting impression on Ted-- in his oratory skills and as object of racial injustice in the deep South.  Traveling cross-country with the team for tournaments in 1961, Horace was denied service in the restaurant of a meal stop in Oklahoma.  Ted intervened by telling the proprietor he would cook Horace’s dinner in the kitchen himself- and then took the team elsewhere.  The bigotry shown his teammate jolted Ted, having been raised in the progressive milieu of northern California.

After graduating from University of Pacific with degrees in political science and history plus the top prize in Journalism for his contributions as editor of the school paper, Ted matriculated at UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall at the time), graduating in 1965. Ted joined Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles, where he became a valued partner until his death. 

Ted often remarked that his six decades as a lawyer included only two employers:  Gibson Dunn and the United States.  His decades long partnership at Gibson was twice interrupted by Presidential appointments:  In 1981, Ted was asked by President Ronald Reagan (his former client at Gibson Dunn) to serve as Associate Attorney General of the United States for the Office of Legal Counsel, where he advised the President on legal matters involving the Executive Branch.  Two decades later he was appointed Solicitor General of the United States under President George W. Bush, during which he argued over a third of his lifetime sixty-five cases before the United States Supreme Court.

Ted’s Washington career was spotlighted by such matters as the 1981 air traffic controllers strike, in which Ted advised President Reagan at a critical stage, facilitating its resolution.  He argued on behalf of President Bush in Bush v. Gore, which resolved the electoral college tie in the 2000 election.  In his last decades of private practice, he fought to defend Constitutional civil liberties, serving as lead lawyer on the winning side of the groundbreaking 2013 Supreme Court decision establishing the right to marry for our gay citizens in the state of California; two years later the High Court resolved the issue for every state in a separate case argued by Mary Bonauto.  Ted argued the case decided by the Court in 2020 that preserved residency protections for DACA recipients (Dreamers), established by executive order of President Obama in 2012. 

The wisdom of another of Ted’s mentors, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, manifested during his five-year litigation for marriage equality: “Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”  When Ted and team filed suit in 2009, outcome in the case was viewed skeptically even by members of the gay community.  Undiscouraged, Ted deployed his talent for teambuilding to unite lawyers from his own firm, from the City of San Francisco and the firm of co-counsel David Boies… coalescing vast support over time, by writing, publishing, travelling the country conducting media interviews. Together the team persuaded folks to open their minds, examine within their predisposed biases.  Public opinion on gay marriage flipped during those five years, from a clear majority against gay marriage to a majority in favor-- by decision time, June of 2013. 

Throughout his career, Ted embraced cases across the traditional dichotomy of conservative/liberal ideology, defying attempts to box him into unnuanced category.  Ted was the master of his own school of thought, rooted in respect for human dignity and the institutions of American democracy and Rule of Law.  His ethos was grounded in action.  As a partner in the L.A. office of Gibson Dunn, Ted mentored to partnership an African American woman and first Mexican American woman.  Across his career and on both coasts, Ted mentored the young: new and aspiring lawyers, his own children and granddaughters, nieces and nephews, always with relish and a sense of duty. 

As public and private citizen, Ted’s libertarian instincts bubbled up throughout his life, beginning in 1964 when he campaigned for Barry Goldwater for President.  Ted became a leader of the Federalist Society after it was born of a handful of founders in the early 1980’s (now numbering over 75,000), hosting yearly picnics for chapter presidents in his Virginia backyard, nine of those years with his co-host, wife Lady.  Ted wanted to encourage new branches on college campuses, as a counterweight to his growing sense of a monochromatic brand of liberalism in academia that verged on institutional group think, discouraging opposing views.  Consistent with his fierce belief in freedom of expression, Ted pressed Fed Soc, as it is known, to resist taking official policy positions on issues and instead foster the forum as a robust marketplace of ideas, deploying the Socratic method to build discussion upon cornerstone values of free expression and thought.  Indeed, owing in part to Ted’s influence, the Society invited eminent journalist Bari Weiss (a woman married to a woman) to keynote speak at the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention, fall of 2023.  Bari received a robust standing ovation.

Complementing his law practice, Ted served for many years on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation Board, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and the Presidential Commission on White House Fellows.

A prodigious reader of all genres, he devoured news and information with the appetite of a Norwegian Bigfoot, always seeking diverse sources and points of view.  

A life largely in overdrive, Ted appreciated downtime with his family and friends… a good Cabernet Sauvignon never far from reach. With joie de vivre and his mother’s curiosity, he traveled and biked across the world with myriad friends, enjoying a rich social and extracurricular life with wife Lady, and as often as possible with his kids, grandkids and great-grands.    

Ted was perhaps happiest when enveloped in cherished family and sylvan beauty at the “Tip ‘o the Thumb” of the Door County Peninsula.  Every summer until his death, Ted and siblings continued the Olson rite of pilgrimage to Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, to bathe in the simple pleasures of the natural world:  fishing trout, salmon and whitefish in Lake Michigan and in the spring-fed waters of Europe Lake... grilling under pine-tree canopies... hiking through the birch groves or on tranquil Isle View Road, where red-winged blackbirds sing from the slough to herald the advent of Spring. 

Ted valued the community spirit of Door, a place of grounded folk who care about the land, the water, without pretense or any agenda but to preserve its natural beauty for the enjoyment of all.  He supported the abundant creative arts milieu of his native county.  He enjoyed sunsets on Europe Lake, taking in his great-grandkids’ discovery of nature’s delight in the lake and surrounding woods.  Ted particularly loved to walk his Aussies with Lady through the wooded trails behind their home on Lake Michigan, trails blazed by brother John.  Or to read a George Higgins mystery on the deck under the pines, Willie Nelson playing on the deck speakers, Lake Michigan lapping at the shore, just below.

Ted Olson is survived by his devoted wife and partner of 22 years, Lady Evelyn Booth, a lawyer and mission-driven entrepreneur who joined enthusiastically with her husband in every step of their personal and professional lives, most rewardingly in the seven-year legal fight for marriage equality.

Ted is survived by his loving son and daughter from his marriage to Karen Beatie Wood:   Christine E. Olson, a career businesswoman, corporate executive with American Express, born in 1966 in Los Angeles to the delight of Ted’s parents and brothers and sisters… and son Kenneth J. Olson, born in 1969, a skilled technology specialist, currently network manager for Loudon County, Virginia.  

His is survived by three granddaughters:  Hayley Olson Godwin (James), Jillian Olson and Kirstin Olson, all career women whom “Grandpa Ted” was fiercely proud of.

He is survived by five great-grandchildren, Henry, Thomas, Rose, Eloise and Delilah.

Ted is also survived by his four siblings, all of whom share summers together in Door County:  Claudia Alt, John Olson, Kirstin Cravens and husband Dee, Joan Hushahn and husband Max.

Ted is survived by many beloved nieces and nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews.  

Ted is survived by his second wife, Jolie Bales, whose sister Kate Moulene connected Ted to the Proposition 8 marriage equality litigation.

Ted was preceded in death by his parents, Yvonne and Lester, stepfather Dick, sister-in-law Susi Olson, and wife Barbara Bracher Olson, who perished tragically on 09/11/2001.

At home in Virginia, Ted’s and Lady’s Aussie shepherds await his return for their daily walks.

Memorial Arrangements:   A memorial service will be held at 10:30 in the morning on July 26 at Shepherd of the Bay Lutheran Church in Ellison Bay.  Visitation at 10:00 a.m. 

The family kindly requests, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to a Door County organization supported by Ted and Lady:

Door County Land Trust: http://www.doorcountylandtrust.org 

Liberty Grove Historical Society: https://libertygrovehistorical.org

Write On, Door County writeondoorcounty.org   

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