A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America

by Ted Cruz

  As their business crumbled, it put enormous stress on their marriage, so much so that a few years later, their marriage fell apart. That was particularly hard for me to accept. Many young children of divorce sadly blame themselves. When my parents split, I was an adult in law school, so fortunately I understood it was not because of me.

  But I tried hard to keep them together. I argued, I cajoled, I pleaded. I printed out and gave my Dad pages and pages of Scriptures on the sanctity of marriage. But, alas, there was nothing I could do. I had to accept that they were adults—like all of us, troubled, flawed, and human—and they were entitled to make mistakes. Even if it cost them their marriage.

  Another consequence of their bankruptcy was that they could no longer help me pay for Princeton, which made me financially independent (involuntarily) at the age of seventeen. When it came to college, I was on my own. Fortunately, I had the money I had earned making speeches and had received a number of other scholarships that helped defray some of the costs. I took out need-based financial aid and worked campus jobs to cover the rest.

  * An altogether different issue is whether the federal government can force Americans to pay for abortion-inducing drugs for others, as the Obama administration has attempted to do to Christian companies like Hobby Lobby and even to the Catholic nuns in the Little Sisters of the Poor (a charity caring for the poor and elderly). Fortunately, the Supreme Court rejected that attempt, ruling that the federal government cannot force us to violate our religious faith.

  * In 1975, my parents sold their small company, which had been renamed Veritas. Today Veritas has grown into a multibillion-dollar company. Alas, they retained no proprietary interest, and so they did not benefit from its subsequent growth.

  CHAPTER 3

  Enter the Ivies

  She was a junior senator sitting across from twelve officers—the most senior uniformed men and women of the U.S. military, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chiefs of the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. And that didn’t bother Kirsten Gillibrand in the least.

  The June 4, 2013, hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee was not convened to discuss matters of war or peace, but an epidemic from within, one damaging the culture of discipline within the military ranks. It included an unprecedented showing of military brass in the halls of Congress. The officers’ combined thirty-nine stars gleamed in the hearing room’s unforgiving lights and flickered in the constant flashes from cameras.

  Though the vast majority of the men and women in uniform are capable and honorable, the U.S. military had handled sexual assault and harassment cases the wrong way for many years. In 2012, there were more than 26,000 instances of unwanted sexual contact in the U.S. military. Fewer than 3,400 of them were formally reported through the chain of command. Unfortunately, the brass didn’t have a viable plan to address this growing crisis, one that imperiled the military’s performance, other than something approximating “Trust us. We’ll get it right this time.”

  That wasn’t enough for the determined Democrat who had assumed the New York U.S. Senate seat left vacant after Hillary Clinton resigned to become secretary of state. Gillibrand had built a reputation for bucking the standard way of doing things—she first won a seat in the House of Representatives by running as a Democrat who supported Second Amendment rights and opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants. Once elected, she became the first member of Congress to publish her entire official schedule every day, so that her constituents knew exactly with whom she met, including lobbyists and lawyers. She also made a point of publishing the earmark requests she had requested and received, as well as her own personal financial statement. As a senator, she authored parts of the STOCK Act, which imposed limits on the scandalous but legal practice of insider trading by members of Congress. That didn’t win her any new friends among her colleagues. Neither did her determination to confront the senior leaders of the U.S. military, as she was doing today.

  “You have lost the trust of the men and women who rely on you—that [you] will actually bring justice in these cases,” she told the assembled officials. “They are afraid to report. They think their careers will be over. They fear retaliation. They fear being blamed.”

  An accomplished lawyer, she had been working for months on legislation to reform the military justice system. In keeping with tradition of the U.S. military, the decision to refer cases for prosecution of a crime—whether refusing an order or murder—lies solely with the commanding officer. That is one reason that tens of thousands of cases of unwanted sexual contact go unreported in the U.S. military every year. Victims are afraid to report the crime to their superiors, who are the ultimate arbiters of whether the offenders will be prosecuted or not. In the most flagrant cases, those arbiters are the offenders themselves.

  In these efforts, Gillibrand stood against not only the entire senior rank of the Department of Defense, but also the presidential administration of her own party, as well as the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, and dozens of other Democrats unwilling to challenge the status quo or pick what might be an unpopular fight against the military.

  I knew Senator Gillibrand was right in her approach, which is why I signed on to the bill as a cosponsor. The truth is that too many victims fear that their commanders cannot be objective about the men and women in their command. Nor can they know the ins and outs of sexual assault, as an experienced military prosecutor does. Israel, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany have made reforms similar to the ones Gillibrand put forward. The result was a marked improvement in how cases of sexual assault are reported and prosecuted.

  But the issue was profoundly personal for me as well. I knew what my aunt had experienced when she was a prisoner in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. And I had been an advocate for enhanced sexual assault prevention efforts while in student government at Princeton.

  It took almost a full year after that hearing for Senate Democrats to allow Gillibrand’s bill to come to a vote. Even then, as I fought alongside Senator Gillibrand on March 6, 2014, it fell five votes short of the number needed to overcome a Senate filibuster. In public remarks after the vote, Gillibrand publicly faulted her own party’s president, Barack Obama, for failing to support the measure.

  That June, a military court-martial finally disposed of one of the most notorious sexual assault cases in memory. General Jeffrey Sinclair, a twenty-seven-year Army veteran, had been accused of sodomizing a female soldier and threatening to kill her if she told anyone about their affair.1 The charges carried a maximum jail sentence of twenty years; by most accounts, General Sinclair got off easy. He was spared any jail time and fined twenty thousand dollars. Gillibrand was outraged. “This case has illustrated a military justice system in dire need of independence from the chain of command,” she said. I knew she’d press on to fight the good fight again. And in time, we’ll change the system.

  I was thrilled to go to Princeton. The first time I saw the campus, I fell in love with it. It was idyllic, picturesque, and looked like what an elite college campus is supposed to be. The Gothic architecture, majestic and covered in ivy, took my breath away. Countless black squirrels playfully chased each other in circles on the central lawn. It was also hard not to be impressed by the fact that, in revolutionary times, the Continental Congress had met at Nassau Hall, the central building at Princeton.

  In the summer after my junior year of high school, my parents and I had toured about a dozen schools—Georgetown, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Dartmouth, and others. Each time I would ditch my parents as soon as possible and go and speak to actual students. I asked things like, How do you like this school? What’s it like? More than any other place we visited, it struck me that Princeton students loved to be at Princeton.*

  Princeton was a completely new world for me, and it wasn’t easy to adjust. Most of my fellow students had come from elite schools, whereas back home I knew virtually nobody who
had gone to an Ivy League school. As the son of a Cuban immigrant with a little bit of a Texas drawl and cowboy boots, I felt distinctly different, and I found out in short order that my roommate agreed with me.

  Much to my dismay, my randomly assigned freshman year roommate—a liberal student from New Jersey—took an immediate dislike to me. I had never had a roommate before; my half sisters were much older than I, and so I was mostly raised an only child. I had hoped my roommate and I would be lifelong friends, but alas, he spent much of his time treating me with contempt. I have no doubt that, as an immature seventeen-year-old, I contributed to his antipathy (indeed, my annoying habit of repeatedly hitting the snooze button led him to surreptitiously superglue it in place), but it was nonetheless disappointing.

  But I was rescued from an entire year of petty torment by the most unlikely of saviors.

  About a dozen of us were gathered in our resident advisor’s dorm room when a sixteen-year-old Jamaican student entered the room a few minutes late. David Panton was six foot three, over two hundred pounds. Handsome and graceful, he immediately went up to each student and in his distinctive accent warmly introduced himself. He told us he was born and raised in Mandeville, a small town “in the bush,” as he put it. He radiated charisma and integrity. He almost instantly became my best friend.

  We found in each other strengths that complemented our own individual weaknesses. He found in me an intensity and drive to succeed, which in turn helped him realize his own potential. And I found that he had a natural charm and ease with people, an EQ, if you will, that can only be called God-given and with which I had not been blessed.

  I learned this the hard way when I was unexpectedly invited by members of the Princeton basketball team, who lived upstairs in our dorm, to participate in a regular game of poker. I had enjoyed playing poker as a kid. I had learned to play from my maternal grandmother when she babysat me. And I thought I was pretty good.

  Granny was a wonderful card player; she had played bridge almost every week for sixty years. She taught me to play poker using buttons and costume jewelry as chips. I always won. When I was about eight, I came over one evening and told her, “Granny, let’s play for real money.” I had five dollars, which I’d saved up from ten weeks of allowance (fifty cents a week) and which I displayed to her proudly with every expectation of doubling or even tripling it. Granny said, “Sure.” For the first time, she didn’t let me win. She cleaned me out of my five dollars, and when my mom picked me up that night, there was a twinkle in her mother’s Irish eyes. I was in tears, my pockets empty.

  Alas, I didn’t learn the lesson I should have from Granny: that famous admonition about a fool and his money.

  At Princeton, I was so taken with playing poker with these popular basketball players that it never occurred to me that they didn’t actually want to be my friends. They were sophomores, cool varsity jocks, and I was a “fish”—an easy mark. And, unbeknownst to me (and one other fellow), they had agreed to secretly pool their winnings, a huge advantage in a poker game. By the time I realized what had happened, I owed them two thousand dollars.

  My mom and dad were bankrupt. My campus job barely covered my existing expenses. I was embarrassed and didn’t want to admit my stupidity to my parents. So I called my Tía Sonia, who was working in a bank at the time. She quietly arranged for me to get a loan of two thousand dollars. When I gave the money to the guys—in cash, forty crisp fifty-dollar bills—I told them that I knew they had suckered me out of the money. But since I had made the bets, I intended to honor my word. That left me with an outstanding loan that I paid back, on time, over the next two years; I took a second campus job to make the payments. It also left me with another important lesson about the perils of trying too hard to be popular.

  My first job was filming and editing videos for the media services office of the university. It paid $7.50 an hour, and was pretty fun to do. My second job was teaching the SAT and the LSAT for the Princeton Review. I’ve always enjoyed teaching, and this job paid $15.00 an hour, which really helped cover my expenses.

  It took me a little time to find my footing academically. My major was in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, commonly known on campus as “Woody Woo.” It was a multidisciplinary major, which you could tailor to fit your interests. I ended up taking primarily economics and political theory and philosophy courses, all of which I really enjoyed. But unlike in high school, I was not a top student. Princeton was harder than Second Baptist (to put it mildly), and the first couple of years, I just didn’t put in the work that I should have academically.

  Instead, I had dived into a variety of extracurricular activities, especially debate and student government. Junior year, David was elected student body president and I was elected to the University Council, which I went on to chair. Together we led the student government. We fought back overly politicized efforts—such as the misguided drive to expel ROTC from Princeton—and tried to focus on more mundane matters, such as improving campus life for our fellow students. We worked to improve the student center, to enhance food quality in the cafeterias, to improve campus safety and rape awareness and prevention, those were the areas where we focused our energy.

  My extracurriculars, along with my two jobs, consumed most of my waking hours, so much so that on the way to one of my final exams, I had to ask another student where our classroom was located. When I got my grades I found that my lackluster efforts were not up to Princeton’s standards. The grades weren’t terrible, but instead of the A’s I’d gotten in high school, they were mostly B’s, which could pose a problem for getting into law school, which I was beginning to envision as my next academic step.

  I knew I needed to focus more on my classes, but I found it very difficult to curtail my interest in the debate team. I hadn’t formally debated before (our high school was too small to have a team), but it was fascinating. The debate team came to consume an enormous portion of my life at Princeton, and it helped me hone a set of skills that proved immensely useful in my subsequent career. Debates at Princeton were far more complex and rigorous than anything approaching “debate” in a political campaign or on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The latter two, alas, more closely resemble an exchange of talking points—two ships passing in the night—rather than an actual give-and-take of ideas and arguments.

  The debate team at Princeton is part of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, the largest extracurricular group on campus. Originally two societies dating back to 1765, the American Whigs had been founded by James Madison when he was a student. The Clios were founded by William Paterson. In 1928, after the two societies had battled endlessly, they were forcibly merged by the university.

  Madison, considered the father of the U.S. Constitution, is one of my personal heroes, and his genius in restraining government to allow individual liberty to flourish is what set the foundation for our prosperity. However, the party he founded, the American Whigs, had become the liberal party on campus, and the Clios were the conservatives. I ended up chairing the Clios, and David was my whip. I always found it ironic that I couldn’t join the party Madison had founded even though I agreed with virtually every one of his views.

  In one of our last debates leading the Clios, David and I argued the position that “Princeton should end affirmative action.” Together we argued that, rather than discriminating based on race, Princeton should instead adopt economic affirmative action, targeting low-income prospective students. That policy would accomplish similar ends, but would be far more fair. It was striking to have that position advocated by a Hispanic man and a black man, and apparently we were persuasive; when the roughly one hundred or so students who attended the debate voted at the end, our side prevailed by a substantial margin.

  At Princeton, debate was modeled after the British House of Parliament. In each round a participant would either represent Her Majesty’s Government or the Loyal Opposition. The government would propose an affirmative case—such as �
�We should withdraw from NATO” or “We should eliminate the estate tax”—while the opposition, obviously, debated against that proposition. The parliamentary style of debate was meant to encourage argument based on values, principles, and reasoning. By our sophomore year, David and I had become regular debate partners, and between practice and competition, debating took up just about every weekend and much of the week.

  Earlier I mentioned that one of the qualities David found appealing in me was that I was driven. Well, debate sometimes showed him the flip side of that coin. During a debate tournament, we typically drove to the tournament site (usually colleges up and down the eastern seaboard) on Friday morning. Then, that afternoon and evening we would have a couple of rounds, followed by a debate party. On Saturday we would have a couple more rounds, going to quarterfinals, semifinals, and the finals. Debates would usually wrap up late Saturday afternoons when we would drive back to Princeton, arriving on campus around midnight or so. In each round of the tournaments, judges prepared written ballots scoring individual speeches and critiquing the debate.

  When we returned to Princeton on these late Saturday nights, I insisted that David and I go up to our room, sit down, and assess our performance so we could learn from our mistakes. We would spend hours reviewing the ballots. If we lost one round, for example, we would go on endlessly dissecting what we did wrong, and how we could have done better. Even if we had won a round, we’d ask how the other side could have beaten us. Or how we could have won by a bigger margin. We learned from these discussions, which would extend till three or four in the morning, which would often prompt David to protest, “Enough already! This is madness.”