A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America

by Ted Cruz

  But the madness paid off. By senior year, David and I had debated in all four years of college. We had won dozens of tournaments. And we ended up winning “Team of the Year,” awarded to the top debate team in the country. Individually, I was named “Speaker of the Year” and David was the named the second-place “Speaker of the Year.”*

  Debate was the most rewarding experience of college. It was great fun, and it taught me a great deal.

  However, by the time my junior and senior years came around, I became far more serious about my grades, realizing that I needed to bring up my GPA if I wanted to attend a top law school. I went to the financial aid office, and was able to get additional student loans. I wasn’t thrilled about the debt burden, but the loans enabled me to stop working my campus jobs and focus instead on my studies.

  The additional work yielded results. Junior year, my grades steadily rose from B’s to A’s, and even more so in senior year.

  But there was one unfortunate exception. Princeton does a terrific job teaching students to write, both through incessant essays in class and also through requiring students to write three major academic works: a senior thesis and two junior papers (“JPs”).

  One of my JPs was overseen by a fairly well-known liberal professor on campus named Stanley Katz. My paper compared the benefits of private charitable institutions with government welfare, assessing which produced better results for the people being helped.

  My paper concluded that, if you want to really help those in need, private charities do it better. The JP examined empirical data and also drew heavily from interviews I conducted, including with members of my church in Houston, which at the time ran a substantial food bank program and worked closely with the homeless.

  Both reflected the reality that volunteers in the private sector who depend on donations to keep their efforts afloat have a vested interest in helping people down on their luck get back on their feet, so that the charity can then help other people in need. The best cure for poverty is not temporary food and shelter (although those are certainly needed), but a job and the ability to provide for your family. As the adage goes, Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.

  And private charities are far more likely to work not only to feed and clothe those in need, but also to help train them and get them interviews for jobs. Moreover, through the church, they can also help with their spiritual needs, which can be transformational in their lives.

  Under government assistance, by contrast, there is far less of an incentive to help people become independent. Government programs don’t tend to run out of money, regardless of whether they help people or not. In fact, the larger the homeless problem, the more money government programs receive.

  When the paper was submitted, it received a B, which is a perfectly good grade. I’d received quite a few B’s earlier at Princeton in classes that I rarely attended. But I’d worked hard on this paper, interviewed lots of people, and felt that it deserved a higher grade.

  So I went to Katz’s office, told him I was confused by my grade, and asked him what I had needed to do to get an A. He told me he was displeased that I had cited some of the empirical work on poverty done by Charles Murray, a conservative scholar whom I would later learn Katz despised. He looked at me dismissively and said, “I don’t think you are academically capable of earning an A.”

  His answer took me aback, and at the time I wondered what was driving his condescension and hostility. Was it ideological prejudice, or something else?

  Regardless, his assessment of my ability differed markedly from that of my other professors; indeed, based on the remainder of my departmental GPA, that single grade likely knocked me down from graduating summa cum laude to graduating cum laude.

  Fortunately, that experience was the exception, not the rule. I had wonderful professors in college, most notably Robby George, one of the leading conservative thinkers in the nation. Learning from Professor George was one of the best things about Princeton. The New York Times has called him the “country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker.” As Glenn Beck has observed, George is “one of the biggest brains in America.” From abortion to marriage to the natural rights of men and women, George is a sometimes lonely but always powerful voice within academia for the Judeo-Christian values on which this country was founded.

  Professor George oversaw my other JP, and he then became my senior thesis advisor. We became friends, and I came to know his sense of humor, sometimes at my own expense.

  When I received my JP back from Professor George, the top right corner of the first page was folded over. On it was written “C+.” The blood literally drained from my face. With the super-seriousness of a nineteen-year-old, I was certain that my chances of getting into law school were finished. With white knuckles, I folded the corner over, and on the front was written “Just kidding! A.”

  Professor George found it pretty funny, as did I . . . years later.

  My senior thesis focused on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Ninth says that the “enumeration . . . of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.” The Tenth says that the “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution . . . are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

  My thesis argued that both amendments work together to restate the same principle, that we have a federal government of enumerated powers. Rights and powers are mirror images; a right is an immunity from government authority, and a power is the ability for government to act where rights end.

  When the Constitution was adopted, it lacked a Bill of Rights. The Framers engaged in a vigorous argument about whether that was a fatal flaw. My thesis retraced that argument. The Federalists argued that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the federal government couldn’t violate those rights anyway. Why protect the freedom of speech, or religion, or the right to keep and bear arms, when restricting those rights didn’t fall within the enumerated powers of the federal government? And if we added a Bill of Rights, it would suggest that otherwise the government could indeed restrict them.

  The Anti-Federalists replied that politicians always want more power, so we should do everything we can to safeguard our rights. And our rights could be violated even within the enumerated powers; for example, the U.S. Post Office (explicitly authorized by the Constitution) could be run in a manner that censored our mail, violating our free speech.

  Ultimately, the Anti-Federalists had the better of the argument, and we adopted a Bill of Rights. But the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, the last two of the Bill of Rights, were added to make absolutely clear that federal government’s power remains limited. Listing rights that are protected doesn’t imply that those are our only rights, or that the federal government has authority beyond that expressly given it.

  The Framers had seen firsthand what happens when government power is unchecked; indeed, we had just fought a bloody revolution to free ourselves from a distant monarch. The Constitution was designed, as Jefferson put it, “as chains to bind the mischief of government.”

  In Federalist 51, James Madison explained, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. . . . In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Drawing inspiration from that insight, my thesis was titled “Clipping the Wings of Angels.”

  As I completed my thesis, I also applied to law school. I thought seriously about going home, to the University of Texas School of Law. It’s a terrific school (indeed, years later, I would join the adjunct faculty teaching Supreme Court litigation) and there’s no better place to go for practicing law in Texas.

  But there was another school that I had my sights set on. I knew that if I had the grades and test scores to get into Harvard Law School, I couldn’t say no. The no
velist Scott Turow had captured the intensity of the school’s first-year experience in One L, and the bestselling novel The Paper Chase had become a movie and then a television show. It was hard to imagine anything that might mean more to my immigrant father than for his son to attend Harvard Law School.

  Besides its iconic status, Harvard promised some of the best professors and students imaginable. I wanted to learn from them all, inside and outside the classroom. I was excited to imagine sitting in a classroom, debating constitutional law with a professor who literally wrote the (case) book on the subject and with a student who might one day be a Supreme Court justice. Sure, many of them would be liberal. But that was no deterrent. I wanted to test my beliefs against the best the other side had to offer, and I couldn’t think of a better place to do so.

  To my great relief, I got in. And, to make it even better, so did David. He and I would be going to Harvard together, roommates once again.

  * My second choice would have been Dartmouth, which was an outstanding institution with an incredible campus in the rather isolated town of Hanover, New Hampshire. The students were very welcoming. On my visit there, I spent the night with some Dartmouth students, who brought me to a frat party. What followed was an evening of dice games and significant quantities of beer. Much to my parents’ displeasure, when they picked me up the next day for our trip to Brown University, I was not in an ideal frame of mind. In fact, at a meeting the next day with an admissions counselor at Brown, I had to ask her to please lower her voice because, I told her, I was really hungover. That probably did not leave the best of impressions.

  * The prior year, we had been named the second-place Team of the Year, beaten for the top spot by our friends and very talented Yale debaters Austin Goolsbee and David Gray. That year, Gray was named Speaker of the Year, and I was the second-place Speaker of the Year. Gray became an Anglican minister in Maryland. Goolsbee, who was a year ahead of us, would go on to become a well-regarded professor at the University of Chicago and the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

  Austin’s economic views tend to the left, but he’s one of the funniest people you could ever know. Indeed, one time, when we were playing basketball against each other, he repeatedly taunted me (in a faux southern accent) to take shots farther and farther out. He was so hysterical that I couldn’t resist, and they beat us at hoops, too.

  CHAPTER 4

  May It Please the Court

  Tyler, Texas, was named for an obscure former president of the United States. It was a community of some 85,000, about a hundred miles east of Dallas.

  The man driving through the city’s streets in the seven-year-old Mercedes on April 19, 1994, was John Luttig.1 He was heading home from Dallas with his wife, Bobbie, seated in the car beside him.

  In their rearview mirror, the couple could catch sight of a car following behind them. Its occupants were a group of teenagers and its driver was a man with angry eyes and a .45-caliber pistol at his side. Napoleon Beazley told his friends that night that he wanted to see what it felt like to kill somebody.

  The Luttigs pulled into their garage, hoping that the pursuing car would drive away. Instead, Beazley’s car swerved in right behind them. Beazley exited his car and stripped off his shirt, carrying the pistol in his hand. Another passenger, Donald Coleman, followed behind with a sawed-off shotgun.

  Before the 63-year-old John Luttig could take any action, Beazley ran toward his Mercedes and fired one round. The bullet hit Luttig on the side of his head. Then Beazley’s eyes turned toward the woman in the passenger’s seat.2

  As her husband lay gravely wounded, a horrified Bobbie Luttig pushed herself out of the passenger’s side of the Mercedes in an attempt to flee. Beazley fired a shot at her, and thankfully missed. Still, she fell to the ground and rolled under the vehicle. As she later put it, “I was wondering what the bullet would feel like if it went through my back. I was wondering what it would—how it would feel to die.”

  Satisfied, Napoleon returned to his first victim, raised his gun, and fired a fatal shot.

  Bobbie Luttig heard her husband cry out as he died. “I had never heard a sound like it,” she said, “never heard the horror that was in it, in his voice.”3

  Then, as Beazley stood in the victim’s blood, he looked for the keys to the Mercedes.

  His attention turned again to the other victim of the attack. “Is she dead?” he asked.

  Still carrying the sawed-off shotgun, Donald replied that, no, she was still moving.

  “Shoot the bitch!” Beazley ordered.

  Donald at first refused. When Napoleon insisted, Donald replied that he was wrong. She already was dead, he lied.

  Beazley then took the Mercedes and pulled it out of the driveway. Later commenting on the carjacking and murder, this evil man was heard to comment that the experience “was a trip.”

  The brutal and senseless murder of John Luttig electrified the city of Tyler and soon received national attention. The Luttigs’ son, Michael, was one of the most well-respected judges on the federal court, a close friend to a number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. And he happened to be my boss.

  The murder of John Luttig occurred shortly after I had been hired as a clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Virginia.

  A fastidious man with a mop of dark blond hair, Luttig was a young judge. In fact, when he was appointed to the bench at the age of thirty-six by President George H. W. Bush, he was the youngest federal appellate judge in the country.

  Judge Luttig was extremely close to his dad. And understandably, the episode was a crushing experience. Every one of us who knew him, perhaps thinking of our own dads, was pained to the core.

  While remaining on the bench, Judge Luttig spent much of the next two years following the five separate trials of his father’s murderers. He could recite every detail, every witness statement. And he made it his personal mission to ensure that no one, out of a misplaced sympathy for criminal defendants or their own life’s circumstances, forgot the evil truth about what had happened to his family on that spring evening.

  During sentencing of Napoleon Beazley, Luttig was allowed to give a victim’s impact statement to the jury. The whole statement is worth a read, but here is how he described his world in the days after his father’s senseless murder:

  It’s living in a hotel in your own hometown, blocks away from where you have lived your whole life, because you just can’t bear to go back. . . . It’s packing up the family home, item by item, memory by memory, as if all of the lives that were there only hours before are no more. . . . It’s reading the letters from you, your sister, and your wife, that your dad secreted away in his most private places, unbeknownst to you, realizing that the ones he invariably saved were the ones that just said “thanks” or “I love you.” And really understanding for the first time that that truly was all that he ever needed to hear or to receive in return, just as he always told you. . . . It’s carefully folding each of your husband’s shirts, as you have always done, so that they will be neat when they are given away. . . . It’s watching your mother do this, in your own mind begging her to stop. . . . It’s cleaning out your dad’s sock drawer, his underwear drawer, his ties. . . . It’s packing up your dad’s office for him, from the family picture to the last pen and pencil. . . . It’s reading the brochures in his top drawer about the fishing trip you and he were to take in two months—the trip that your mother had asked you to go on because it meant so much to your dad.

  Most moving, Luttig described the year after the murder, going to the graveyard on Thanksgiving so that his dad wouldn’t have to spend his first Thanksgiving alone.

  It was one of the most powerful things I’d ever read. Even today it fills me with sadness and anger—as well as a great deal of pride for a man who suffered such a devastating loss but still carried on the duties of his office with integrity, honor, and a commitment to the truth.

  I was standing
behind the Chief Justice of the United States and sitting right next to him was the Court’s first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. We were in front of a large computer screen gazing at explicit, hard-core pornography. As we examined the screen before us, I remember very distinctly what the sixty-five-year-old O’Connor said.

  Before I finish that story, maybe I should start from the top.

  As a kid, I didn’t start out wanting to be a lawyer. No one in my immediate family had a law degree, and we didn’t really know any lawyers. But after studying the Constitution in high school, I was hooked.

  In college I spent several summers working at a large Texas law firm to make money. At first I was making copies and performing clerical duties, but over time I pestered the lawyers to let me do some substantive legal research, so much so that they finally gave in. (I am pretty confident they didn’t rely on my work for much of anything.)

  As I think back, one of the things that really attracted me to the law was a 1979 book by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, The Brethren. It was compiled from interviews with former law clerks who shamelessly depicted what really happened inside the Supreme Court and chronicled the justices’ deliberations on major Court decisions.* The book was a serious violation of the trust that the individual justices traditionally place with their law clerks. Whether it was taboo or not, as a young teen I found the book fascinating.

  I try hard to be precise in the things I say. And there was something about the logic of the law, the sense of meting out justice, the respect for precedent and legal canons, that spoke to me. Upholding and respecting the law is the foundation of the American system of justice, which in turn is the very foundation of our democracy. In high school, I decided that being a law clerk at the Supreme Court, working alongside nine of the most revered judges in the land, would be one of the coolest jobs in the world.