by Ted Cruz
I don’t remember the fear and isolation that my mother must have felt. I don’t recall the increased drinking that surely resulted. At the time, I was only a toddler, and so was insulated from the brunt of what was happening.
A few months later, back in Texas, a friend from the oil business invited my father to attend a Bible study being taught by a local life insurance agent. Although reluctant, my father decided to go, and he was struck by the peace he saw in the lives of those at the Bible study, despite the challenges they faced. One woman described how she lived with her son, who beat her to get money to buy drugs, and yet she was filled with what Scripture describes as “a peace that surpasses all understanding.” My father was baffled.
The hosts gave him a copy of a booklet published by Campus Crusade and titled The Four Spiritual Laws. He read it carefully, and returned to the Bible study the next week.
He still had many questions, and they invited him to come to their home again the next night, to visit with Galen Wiley, their pastor from nearby Clay Road Baptist Church. For four hours, my dad argued with the pastor about the Bible, about religion in general, and about Christ. Finally, at about 11 p.m., my father asked, “What about the man up in the mountains of Tibet who has never heard of Jesus?”
Pastor Wiley wisely didn’t take the bait. Instead, he replied, “I don’t know about the man in Tibet. But you have heard about Jesus. What’s your excuse?”
The question hit my father like a sledgehammer. And, shortly after 11 p.m. on Tuesday, April 15, 1975, he dropped to his knees and surrendered his life to Jesus. That day changed his life, and mine as well.
The following Sunday, he made a public profession of faith at Clay Road, a small church in the suburbs of Houston. And the next week, he went to the airport, bought a ticket, and flew back to Canada, returning to my mother and me. He asked my mom to forgive him, and for them to start over. Five years later, in 1979, I too asked Jesus to be my savior at Clay Road Baptist Church.
When people ask if faith is real, I don’t have to speculate; I’ve seen the fruits of a walk with Christ in my own life and in my family. Were it not for my father’s becoming a Christian, I would have been raised by a single mother. I would have lived without my dad in the home, facing the hardships that are unfortunately far too common in our society, as single parents so often struggle mightily to provide for their children.
Instead, my parents reunited. Shortly thereafter they sold their business in Calgary* and moved us down to Houston, where my mother also became a born-again Christian. Both of them quit drinking, and their lives were transformed.
Houston was a booming oil town when we arrived, and it was where I spent the remainder of my youth. For grade school, I attended West Briar, a small private school that had been founded by a number of Jewish doctors. It was a terrific school, and I was fortunate to have a fantastic teacher, Miss Jennings, for both third and fifth grades. She taught more grammar in elementary school than you’ll find in most high school English classes (it seemed we would diagram sentences endlessly). Roughly half the school was Jewish, which led me to believe until I was ten that half the world was Jewish. Every year, we’d play with dreidels, enjoy latkes, and celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas side by side, and think nothing of it.
I went to the Awty International School for junior high. Awty, located in Houston, was half French; many of the students were the children of French diplomats or businesspeople. It was a strong academic institution, but I clashed with the teachers, strict disciplinarians whose European pedagogy consisted of them lecturing on and on and students silently taking notes. Instead, I preferred more engagement.
In both elementary and junior high, I was a geeky kid. As the child of two mathematicians, schoolwork always came easily for me, and I was consistently at the top of my class, except in handwriting (to this day, I still write in block letters rather than cursive).
My parents are both driven, and I share their competitiveness. Indeed, my dad and I both love games, from dominoes to cards, and when we played Monopoly my mom would flee the room laughing, it was so cutthroat.
Being hypercompetitive did not help, however, in sports. Neither of my parents is athletic, and I inherited their lack of talent in that arena. And since I wasn’t very good, I refused to play sports as a child. That, of course, made me even worse. That mix—excelling in the classroom, being too competitive and cocky about academics, and being lousy at sports—was, needless to say, not a recipe for popularity.
Midway through junior high school, I decided that I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd. 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.”
First off, I decided that my existing policy of refusing to play sports simply because I wasn’t good at them was not a wise plan if I wanted to be accepted by kids at school. I then decided to join the soccer team, the football team, and the basketball team. I was terrible at all three, but I kept at it. Around that time I got my braces off. I went to a dermatologist, and my acne cleared some. I got contacts instead of glasses. I also shot up about six inches.
I started trying to behave differently. I tried to be less cocky. When I received a test exam back, even though I’d probably done well, I would simply put it away. I wouldn’t look at it. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was interesting to see what these sorts of small conscious changes could produce.
Another thing that changed was my name. In Spanish, the diminutive is formed by adding -ito; thus, the diminutive of my full name, Rafael, was Rafaelito, which in turn was shortened to Felito. Until I was thirteen, I was “Felito Cruz.” The problem with that name was that it seemed to rhyme with every major corn chip on the market. Fritos, Cheetos, Doritos, and Tostitos—a fact that other young children were quite happy to point out.
I was tired of being teased. One day I had a conversation with my mother about it and she said, “You know, you could change your name.
“There are a number of other possibilities,” she said. And she proceeded to list them: Rafael. Raph. Ralph. Edward. Ed. Eddie. “Or you could go by Ted.” I found that a shocking concept. It had never occurred to me that I had any input on my name.
“Ted” immediately felt like me. But my father was furious with the decision. He viewed it as a rejection of him and his heritage, which was not my intention.
“What do you mean Ted is a nickname for Edward?” he snapped at my mother. “Who’s ever heard of that?”
My mother’s response was unfortunate. “Well, there’s Ted Kennedy,” she said.
My father was apoplectic. He had no love for liberals. In fact, he believed the American far left was trying to turn this country in a dangerously socialist direction, much like the reviled Castro regime. One of the biggest fights he had had with my mother was in 1976, when she had voted for Jimmy Carter. (She quickly came to regret that decision when his haplessness became manifest.) To equate me with Teddy Kennedy was too much. For about two years, he refused to utter my new name.
My parents also decided to transfer me to Faith West Academy in ninth grade. Faith West was a brand-new school, located in a renovated “Handy Dan” hardware store. It was not at all academically rigorous, but my parents very much valued a strong Christian education.
At Faith West, I achieved something that had long eluded me: I was relatively popular. Again I played football, soccer, and basketball; I was still lousy at them, but had gotten marginally better. I also joined the yearbook, the newspaper, and the speech team, and ended up being twice elected class president.
Going from an unpopular kid in junior high to being elected class president in high school was, as one would imagine, a fairly startling transformation. It was fun. And, interestingly, it taught me a vital lesson: that popularity wasn’t all that consequential. Happiness doesn’t come from popularity, but rather from doing someth
ing that matters, making a difference, and fulfilling God’s plan for your life.
Probably the biggest academic influence on my life in high school, and well beyond, for that matter, came from my involvement in what was then called the Free Enterprise Education Center (now known as the Free Enterprise Institute). The center was founded by Rolland Storey, a retired businessman and motivational speaker who had worked for Houston Natural Gas.
Mr. Storey was a short, impish man, balding with wisps of white hair. He was charming and irascible, reminiscent of commentator Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes. He also was one of the most gifted natural speakers I’ve ever seen.
He had started a speech contest for high school kids based on “the ten pillars of economic wisdom,” the first of which was “Nothing in our material world can come from nowhere or go nowhere, nor can it be free: Everything in our economic life has a source, a destination, and a cost that must be paid.” That led directly to the second pillar: “Government is never a source of goods. Everything produced is produced by the people, and everything that government gives to the people, it must first take from the people.” If only politicians in Washington understood that basic truth. Students were required to prepare a twenty-minute speech on all ten pillars, after reading a curriculum of economic fundamentals including the works of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith, Frédéric Bastiat, and Ludwig von Mises.
This was my first systematic exposure to free-market tenets, and it became the intellectual foundation for many of the ideas I instinctively believed: first and foremost that the greatest engine of prosperity and opportunity the world has ever seen has been the American free enterprise system. Such a system allowed someone like my father, who had nothing but a hundred dollars sewn into his underwear, to build a small business and achieve the American dream.
His opportunity to do that, to earn a living and prosper based on his own individual talents and hard work, was transformational in our family; that journey was commonplace in America, but extraordinary in the annals of history. Until the time of the American experiment, much of human existence had been, as Hobbes famously observed, “nasty, brutish and short.” Now, with American free enterprise, the possibilities were endless—not guaranteed, but also not limited.
I relished the material and was fortunate to be one of the city winners of the speech contest all four years of high school. For that, we earned scholarship money, but even more important, Mr. Storey booked the contest winners to speak on free-market principles at Rotary, Kiwanis, and Exchange clubs and Chambers of Commerce all over Texas.
Standing in front of several hundred businesspeople to talk about free-market economics at the age of thirteen or fourteen was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. In fact, it makes standing in the well of the U.S. Senate seem quite mild by comparison. Only adding to the tension when I started was the fact that I wasn’t very good. The speech I had written had decent content, but my speaking style was stilted. To Mr. Storey, the solution was simple. The key to public speaking, he told me, was to pretend it was the most normal thing in the world. The very best speakers were those who can be in front of a thousand people and yet it feels as if they’re sitting in a café chatting with you over a cup of coffee.
But acting “naturally” can be an incredibly unnatural thing, especially when you are standing in front of hundreds if not thousands of strangers. There is a reason that public speaking typically tops the list of people’s greatest fears, ranking far higher than even death. But I practiced and practiced—with my father relentlessly critiquing my performance—and over time steadily became better.
In my sophomore year I also became involved in a spin-off of the program, called the Constitutional Corroborators. That consisted of five high school students who spent hundreds of hours studying the U.S. Constitution. We read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and the Debates on Ratification. We then memorized the provisions of the Constitution in shortened mnemonic form.
For example, we memorized “TCC NCC PCC PAWN MaMa WReN.” Those letters stood for eighteen enumerated powers of Congress in Article I, section 8 of the Constitution: “taxes, credit, commerce, naturalization, coinage, counterfeiting, post office, copyright, courts, piracy, Army, war, Navy, militia, money for militia, Washington, D.C., rules, and necessary and proper.” If it’s not in that list, Congress has no constitutional authority over it. (As I’ve often joked, you’ll notice there’s no “O” for “Obamacare.”)
Twice every week, my mother would drive me forty-five minutes across town, to the public library in Pasadena, Texas (an industrial suburb of Houston); the five of us students would spend two hours studying with Mr. Storey, while my mom would quietly read a book. And then she’d drive me home.
After many months, we began touring the state of Texas, once again speaking at Rotary clubs and Kiwanis clubs. While our audience sat there having lunch, the five of us would set up easels in the front of the room. On the easels, each of us would write from memory the entire Constitution in a shortened mnemonic form. We’d write a definition of socialism (“government ownership or control of the means of production or distribution in an economy”), under the principle that if you don’t know what it is, you can’t recognize when you have it. And we would write a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was, and never will be.”
Then we delivered a thirty-minute presentation on the Constitution. We closed our presentation with a patriotic poem, “I Am an American,” set to rousing music.
For each speech, the Center would credit us fifty or a hundred dollars in scholarship money. By the time I’d finished high school, I’d given somewhere around eighty speeches, so I’d earned a fair amount of scholarship money for college that way.
The more I studied free-market economics and the Constitution, the more obvious it became to me that there is a systemic imbalance in our political discourse. On the left, for the advocates of government power and statism, the best and the brightest are consistently attracted to the organs for the transmission of ideas, namely politics, journalism, entertainment, or academia. In that respect, Barack Obama is the epitome of the perfect leftist.
On the right, however, for those who believe in free markets and individual liberty, the best and the brightest tend to go make money. They go to the business world, rather than fight in the political arena.
Much of where we are today can be traced to that imbalance.
For me, I was likewise headed in the business direction. As the son of two computer programmers, I was sure where I was going. But then, when I was in tenth grade, someone asked me, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
I repeated by rote what I had said many times before. “I want to go to MIT, and study electrical engineering. Then, get a Ph.D. in computer science, and start a business designing artificial intelligence.”
My father was standing there listening. He looked at me and said, “No you don’t.” Just very matter-of-fact.
I said, “What do you mean, ‘No I don’t’?”
“You haven’t turned your computer on in six months,” he replied. “All you talk about now is law and politics.”
He was right. From then on, if you had asked me what I wanted to do in life, I would have told you, “do everything I can to defend free-market economics and the Constitution.”
Admittedly, it was a bit of a strange answer (I was kind of a weird kid), but the Free Enterprise Institute—combined with my father’s life experiences fleeing oppression and seeking freedom—helped me realize where my passion lay.
Even though I hoped to eventually run for office, I was convinced I would start off in business. I got my first job when I was ten years old, working as a computer operator for my parents’ company. It was 1981, and the computer age was in its infancy. I would operate Raytheon 704 and 706 minicomputers, although there was nothing “mini” about them.
They were the size of a wall. Th
ey used tape readers and card punches, and they had less computing power than an iPhone today. For my labors, my father paid me a dollar an hour. (He didn’t quite understand the child labor laws.) And he would sometimes assign me to work double shifts on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, because no one else would work then. It was a small business and he didn’t want to shut down for the holidays. (He was always nice about it; he’d bring me a plate of turkey and dressing, and then say, “Get back to work!”)
My parents also insisted that I save 50 percent of what I made (a terrific life discipline to instill in children). I still remember the first thing I bought with my working wages: a Yorx stereo, which had a radio, record player, cassette, and eight-track player. In 1981, it cost $137, which represented 274 hours of work!
Three years later, when I was thirteen, I came into my dad’s office to negotiate my first raise.
“Dad, you’re paying me one dollar an hour,” I said. “The other computer operators who work here, you’re paying five dollars an hour. They’re all college students. You’re exploiting me because I’m your son.”
My dad laughed. “I was waiting for you to figure that out,” he said. He promptly gave me a raise to five dollars an hour, which I supplemented by stocking the office’s Coke machine with fifteen-cent cans bought in bulk from the grocery store and later by running a small lawn-mowing business.
In the summer of my sophomore year, I decided to start a business under the name Cruz Enterprises, which I’d borrowed from the multibillion-dollar “Stark Enterprises” in Iron Man comics. As a teenager, I figured I could do a lot worse than trying to model my business after Tony Stark’s.
I had spent the previous summer going door-to-door, setting up leads for salespeople to come by later and try to sell water softeners. The company would give folks $20 in free groceries for taking the meeting, and they’d pay me $15 for every meeting I set up.