Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, … in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth (nee Darragh) Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Eleanor Wilson was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She is of three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.
Cruz's father was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary islander who immigrated to Cuba as a child. As a teenager in the 1950s, he was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2005.
At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz's parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling. Cruz has said that he is the son of "two mathematicians/computer programmers." In 1974, Cruz's father left the family and moved to Texas. Later that year, Cruz's parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father's first marriage. Miriam died in 2011.
Cruz began going by Ted at age 13.
For junior high school Cruz went to Awty International School in Houston. Cruz attended two private high schools: Faith West Academy, near Katy, Texas; and Second Baptist High School in Houston, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1988. During high school, Cruz participated in a Houston-based group known at the time as the Free Market Education Foundation, a program that taught high school students the philosophies of economists such as Milton Friedman and Frederic Bastiat (Wikipedia 2-3).
In his early teens, Cruz was a member of the Constitutional Corroborators, part of a five-strong “unit” of high-achieving, politically minded students managed by Rolland Storey, a retired gas executive from Houston. Storey ran an after-school programme under the banner of a conservative thinktank called the Free Enterprise Education Center (now the Free Enterprise Institute). It was crucial in honing Cruz’s public speaking skills and economic views.
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The Corroborators toured Rotary clubs and chambers of commerce in Houston and across Texas. Their star turn was in setting up easels and writing summaries of the constitution from memory – along with a definition of socialism, so that everyone was clear on the enemy. In his 2015 autobiography, A Time for Truth, Cruz recalled that they gave half-hour presentations on the constitution that ended with a patriotic poem, I Am an American.
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“Midway through junior high school, I decided that I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd,” he wrote in his book. “I remember sitting up one night asking a friend why I wasn’t one of the popular kids. I ended up staying up most of that night thinking about it. ‘Okay, well, what is it that the popular kids do? I will consciously emulate that.’”
He embraced sports and replaced his glasses with contact lenses. His braces came off and he saw a dermatologist who improved his acne. According to this book, he was suspended from high school for several days for going to a party, drinking and smoking pot.
On other occasions, he wrote, he was beaten up by drunk older kids at 2am, and reprimanded by the principal for a prank that involved covering a rival school’s building in toilet paper and shaving cream, then fleeing in a 1978 Ford Fairmont with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blaring out of the car stereo.
Cruz had become popular and respected when, seeking more academic stimulation than he had found at his previous school, he transferred midway through his junior year of high school to Second Baptist, a small private establishment on the campus of a megachurch in one of Houston’s greenest and most desirable areas. Today, Cruz’s family home and campaign headquarters are only a couple of miles away.
Former students and teachers contacted by the Guardian said that Cruz was a brilliant student whose political plans were already crystallizing. “He was very intelligent, a valedictorian the year he graduated. He knew early on he wanted to be in politics and government,” said Gary Moore, a Second Baptist pastor. A classmate, Laurie Rankin Carl, said: “He fit right in … he was head of our class.”
Cruz was heavily involved in extracurricular activities, including the drama club, the public speaking team and sundry school publications. He played American football, soccer and basketball. He was twice class president and vice-president of the student body. “He was very well liked by the teachers and his classmates and was generally considered a prodigy,” said John Fuex, who was a year below Cruz.
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As a fellow Constitutional Corroborator, Laura Calaway spent a week during spring break travelling around Texas in a van with Cruz in 1988. “In hindsight it was all very exciting and I felt important to be a part of this educational group,” she said.
Still, he did not make a good first impression on her. As a high school senior from the blue-collar Houston suburb of Deer Park, she felt that Cruz – a veteran Corroborator whose reputation as a formidable debater preceded him – was aloof.
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Calaway has few other memories of Cruz, but recalled that he found it hard to bond with the others during the road trip. The suggestion echoes critics’ claims that Cruz, for all his eloquence and Texan swagger, can seem stilted in public, too calculating to connect emotionally with his audience.
“I think this is a lifetime struggle of his; he couldn’t relate to us as a group of teenagers. He really struggled in trying to be part of a group dynamic, and the jokes,” she said (Dart 2-3).
When Craig Mazin first met his freshman roommate, Rafael Edward Cruz, he knew the 17-year-old Texan was not like other students at Princeton, or probably anywhere else for that matter.
"I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?" Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.”
By Mazin’s account and those of multiple members of Princeton’s class of 1992, the Ted Cruz who arrived as a college freshman in 1988 was nearly identical to the man who arrived in Washington as a freshman Republican senator in 2013: intelligent, confident, fixated on conservative political theory, and deeply polarizing.
“It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else,” said Erik Leitch, who lived in Butler College with Cruz. Leitch said he remembers Cruz as someone who wanted to argue over anything or nothing, just for the exercise of arguing. “The only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views."
In addition to Mazin and Leitch, several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” "intense," “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant." Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived.
“I would end up fielding the [girls’] complaints: 'Could you please keep your roommate out of our hallway?'" Mazin says.
Cruz also angered a number of upperclassmen his freshman year when he joined in a regular poker game and quickly ran up $1,800 in debt to other students from his losses. Cruz’s spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said Cruz acknowledges playing in the poker games, which he now considers “foolish.”
“He went to his aunt, who worked at a bank in Dallas, and borrowed $1,800 from her, which he paid in cash and promptly quit the game,” Frazier told The Daily Beast, explaining that Cruz worked two jobs and made monthly payments to his aunt for the next two years to repay the debt.
While Cruz may have been disliked, and intensely so, by many of his classmates, he found a close and longtime friend in a gregarious, popular student from Jamaica named David Panton, who became Cruz’s tag-team partner on Princeton’s renowned debate squad, as well as his roommate for the remainder of their time at Princeton and when they both attended Harvard Law School.
“Unlike what others may say, I consider Ted to be very kind. He is a very, very gentle-hearted person,” Panton told The Daily Beast. "He took me under his wing and was a mentor to me. He was very kind to me. I am a much smarter and much better person today because of Ted Cruz."
Cruz and Panton debated together for four years at Princeton and came to dominate the collegiate parliamentary debate circuit, winning the North American championships in 1992 and being named the top two collegiate debaters in the country (Cruz was No. 1). The competitive debate world also gave Cruz a different social circle, with fellow debaters congregating in his room to hang out and play Super Mario Bros. Debate weekends included Friday night parties that Cruz often attended, where he was remembered to be "sort of a stud" with girls on the debate circuit. Princeton debaters also said he spent extra time mentoring them to improve their skills, even though they competed against each other.
Cruz ran for student government president unsuccessfully more than once, but rose to lead the conservative portion of the college’s Whig-Cliosophic Society, a high-minded political club that was co-founded by James Madison (class of 1771). To other students, Cruz seemed singularly interested in ideological life, and Whig-Clio proved the natural outlet for it. Other members of Whig-Clio have included Aaron Burr, Woodrow Wilson, Samuel Alito, and Mitch Daniels.
From Princeton, Cruz joined the intellectual and ideological elite—Harvard Law School, where he finished magna cum laude; a clerkship for Chief Justice William Rehnquist; a stint on the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign working for Josh Bolten (class of ’76); and two jobs in the Bush administration before being appointed Texas’s solicitor general in 2003 and later launching his campaign for Senate.
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“He's not someone who shifts in the wind,” Panton says. “The Ted Cruz that I knew at 17 years old is exactly the same as the Ted Cruz I know at 42 years old. He was very conservative then, and an outspoken conservative. He remains strongly conservative today."
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The time-capsule quality of Cruz’s politics is lost on no one who knew him at Princeton, none of whom could point to a political position that he held 25 years ago that he does not seem to still hold today. For some, that amounts to a laudably consistent belief system. For others, it reveals a man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.
"More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said. “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he's saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing."
While Cruz’s friends from the debate team foresaw a successful career in politics for Cruz, many of the Princeton alums offered that they were deeply troubled by the possibility of Cruz running for president, a notion that one, who did not want to be quoted speaking against a former classmate who is now a senator, called “horrifying.”
Craig Mazin said he knew some people might be afraid to speak in the press about a senator, but added of Cruz, “We should be afraid that someone like that has power.”
And the idea that his freshman roommate could someday be the leader of the free world? “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone,” Mazin said. “I would rather pick somebody from the phone book" (Murphy 2-3).
In his book, “A Time for Truth” Cruz describes his time in college. His parents, who had previously been well off, were in a difficult financial situation at that time, and he needed to work two jobs to help pay his tuition. He also talks about being more interested in debating than schoolwork. He would spend many hours each week preparing for debates, traveling to debates, and analyzing his mistakes after the debates. He became an award winning debater, but this didn't help him earn top grades. At the time, his classes were not his biggest priority. He recalls earning a number of B’s which are not bad grades for Princeton, especially if you consider his lack of effort. Later, in his junior year, he began to take his classes more serious. He quit his jobs and took out student loans to finance his education. He realized that in order to get accepted by a top law school, he needed to boost his GPA. He buckled down, and graduated cum laude. After graduating from Princeton, he attended Harvard Law School, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude (Balsam 1).
Several debaters [interviewed] recalled incidents in which Mr. Cruz used a story about his father coming to America from Cuba with $100 sewn into his underwear for emotional effect. I started asking sources about this. One debater recalled having fun with Mr. Cruz’s Cuban non sequitur, prompting Mr. Cruz, a super-serious debater, to shout, “How dare you insult my father!”
Monica Youn, a teammate who edited the school’s liberal newspaper, said that at the Friday night keg parties, if Mr. Cruz slipped into speech mode, “You would tease him a little bit about it, and he’d stop.” She also said that Mr. Cruz’s over-the-top style held back his debating partner, David Panton, who many described as a “teddy bear.”
Acknowledging that Mr. Cruz was a decorated speaker, Ms. Youn added that his “winning record was never on par with his speaking record. At the end of the day I think being persuasive is somewhat different than being a good speaker in that sometimes you have to rein it back and I don’t think that Ted ever had a really good sense of when to rein it back.”
This basic idea, which I often heard from Republican Senators, was echoed in dozens of on-the-record phone calls. One judge recalled that Mr. Cruz angrily blamed her for coughing and throwing him off his game. Others marveled at his ability to project an aura of absolute conviction, no matter what side of a topic he argued.
“In any debate round, he would act like what he was telling you was something he believed to his core,” said Deborah J. Saltzman, an Amherst debater who is now a judge with the United States Bankruptcy Court in California. Judges who watched him enough became annoyed by his style, she said, adding that opponents had the impression “he would say just about anything, whatever would win the debate.”
When Mr. Cruz moved on to Harvard Law School, he returned to the circuit as a so-called dinosaur; some of the Harvard undergraduates were annoyed and reported watching in disbelief as the older Mr. Cruz beat his school in minor tournaments. They remembered too that as a debater, Mr. Cruz often concluded his oratory by telling the judge, “Frank Sinatra says dooby dooby do, and we’re going to say do — the right thing” (Horowitz 2).
Works cited:
Balsam, Pinchas. “How Well Did Ted Cruz Do in College?” Quora. Net. https://www.quora.com/How-well-did-Ted-Cruz-do-in-college
Dart, Tom. “Ted Cruz in High School: a 'Prodigy' with Plans for World Domination.” The Guardian, February 3, 2016. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/03/ted-cruz-high-school-teenager-yearbook-constitutional-corroborators
Horowitz, Jason. “Digging into Ted Cruz’s Debating History: Reporter’s Notebook.” New York Times, April 24, 2015. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/04/24/digging-into-ted-cruzs-debating-history-reporters-notebook/
Murphy, Patricia. “Ted Cruz at Princeton: Creepy, Sometimes Well-Liked, and Exactly the Same.” Daily Beast, updated July 11, 2017. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ted-cruz-at-princeton-creepy-sometimes-well-liked-and-exactly-the-same?ref=scroll
“Ted Cruz.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz#Early_life_and_family
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