A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America

by Ted Cruz

  First among them was that I liked and deeply respected Tim Muris. He said he wanted to use the FTC to advance strong free-market principles, unlike some of his predecessors in Democratic administrations, who used the FTC to try to expand government control of the economy.

  Second, Tim envisioned my policy planning role to be innovative and aggressive. I wasn’t able to be either of those things in the Justice Department. So, toward the end of May 2001, I left for the FTC.

  But I didn’t go to work right away, because I had a more pressing engagement. I was getting married.

  Historians may differ, but in my opinion the most important moment on the Bush campaign was when they hired a twenty-seven-year-old Harvard Business School student named Heidi Nelson.

  During Heidi’s second year at Harvard, one of Heidi’s mentors suggested she head down to Austin to work on the Bush policy team. She had at the time a world of options—she had worked on Wall Street for a number of years and had done well at Harvard—but thankfully she prayed on it, and chose to come to Texas for the length of the campaign.

  Heidi is a brilliant, meticulous, sunny blonde from California, and I was smitten with her almost immediately. From our first date—a nearly four-hour dinner at a place in Austin called the Bitter End—we found threads in our individual lives that tied us together. For one, there was the profound love and respect we both had for our fathers, each of whom had survived a challenging youth.

  Heidi’s father, Peter, had grown up in an alcoholic home in Los Angeles. His father was a urologist who abandoned the family for one of his nurses. As a result, Heidi’s father was raised by a single mom and he had to help raise his younger sister. He learned responsibility at a very young age, and with great love, he taught that personal responsibility and self-discipline to his own children.

  When Heidi was a little girl, she lived for several months in Kenya and Nigeria, where her parents were Christian missionaries. They’re Seventh-Day Adventists, a Protestant denomination that strictly observes the Sabbath from Friday sundown until Saturday sundown. As a child, she would play for hours in the African wilderness, with kids who spoke only Swahili; somehow the children could all communicate regardless of language barriers.

  Heidi’s maternal grandfather had spent more than thirty years as a missionary in Africa; he was a physician, and helped build a small village. And Heidi’s brother, to this day, is a missionary and orthopedic surgeon, providing medical care for children in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

  Being raised in a missionary family imparted a strong sense of service to Heidi, and a burning desire to make a difference in the lives of those who are less fortunate.

  Most of her childhood was in California, where, at the behest of her father, Heidi started her first company with her brother when she was six years old. That’s not a typo. She and her brother baked bread every day after school from 4 to 8 p.m. They repeated this task every day except Saturday, which was the Sabbath. Then on Sunday they sold the bread all day long at a local apple orchard.

  Quickly Heidi’s small company—which she called “Heidi’s Bakery”—became a real business, selling as many as two hundred loaves a week. By the time she was a teenager, she had saved up somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen thousand dollars. This, as it turned out, was money Heidi needed by the time she applied to college.

  Heidi’s father is loving, but very strong-willed. He’s a dentist and a driven athlete, and for many years he was a mountain climber; in 1990 he climbed Mount Everest, nearly losing his life just a few hours short of the summit. He had gone to Adventist schools, and he insisted that Heidi do so as well.

  Heidi disagreed. She had her heart set on Claremont McKenna, a small liberal arts college in Southern California. And when Heidi decides on something, she cannot be dissuaded. At first her father refused to pay tuition. She battled with him, and paid her own freshman year tuition with the money she had saved selling bread as a child.

  The story immediately struck a powerful chord with me. My mother had likewise stood up to her father to go to Rice. Heidi’s situation was very different from my mom’s—her father shares no characteristics with my alcoholic grandfather—but I immediately connected with and admired Heidi’s strength of character and determination.

  We began dating three days after she arrived on the campaign, and very quickly became best friends.

  After the campaign, Heidi came down to Florida for the recount. She wasn’t a lawyer but she wanted to help the effort any way she could. One day she went into the office of Robert Zoellick, who was serving as Jim Baker’s de facto chief of staff. Sitting at his desk with his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, Bob peered up, and Heidi said, “Bob, I just wanted to see, is there anything I can do to help?”

  He said, “Yes. Grapefruit juice. I want grapefruit juice.” And with that he went back to work.

  Heidi came into the office where I was working hopping mad. “Damn it,” she said. “I’ve got a Harvard MBA. I’ve worked on Wall Street as an investment banker. And his request for me is grapefruit juice!?”

  After a moment, she asked me, “What do I do?”

  I sympathized with her completely. Then I said, “Sweetheart, here are the car keys. Go get him grapefruit juice, right now.”

  Heidi sighed heavily, took the car keys, and drove to the grocery store. She bought a little cooler, filled it with ice, and put a container of grapefruit juice in the cooler. When she came back, she set it on Bob’s desk with a little Post-it note attached: “Per your request, grapefruit juice.”

  The next day she went into his office again and asked hopefully, “Bob, anything I can do to help?”

  He looked up at her and said, “Raisin bread. I’d like some raisin bread.”

  This time she didn’t need to vent. She just took the car keys, bought him raisin bread, and didn’t think about it at all.

  After Bush became president-elect, he named Bob Zoellick to the cabinet as the U.S. trade representative. One of the very first phone calls Bob made was to Heidi to ask her to be his special assistant.

  “You know, for a week I’d been asking people for grapefruit juice,” he observed. “No one would get it for me, and you actually got it done.”

  Heidi told that story in a commencement address to illustrate to the graduates that no job is beneath you. In fact, when she started as his special assistant, Bob said, “I don’t like the trash can in my office. It’s square. I want a round one.” In the same breath he continued, “and also, I need you to develop a small business policy for international trade.” It wasn’t long before she’d solved both problems.

  The whole time I was in Florida for the recount, people were harassing me about asking Heidi to marry me—in fact, it was all I wanted to do. I had planned to ask her in Austin a few days after the election. But I had to leave for Florida so quickly I didn’t even have time to pick up the ring at my apartment. Ted Olson’s wonderful wife, Barbara (an amazing woman who was tragically killed aboard the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11), needled me for an entire flight about not missing my chance with such a great girl. I couldn’t have agreed with her more, and the greatest relief for me once the election was finally over was to get down on one knee and finally ask Heidi to marry me.

  She didn’t respond the way I had envisioned. She burst into laughter at what I had thought was gallantry. But she said yes!

  In May 2001, Heidi and I got married in Santa Barbara, California, just south of where she had grown up. The day before the ceremony, we took our wedding party to a picnic at Rancho del Cielo, the Reagan ranch (it’s now a museum). I think for most of the wedding party, that was their favorite memory of the weekend, but I would be in deep trouble if I were to say it was mine.

  I will say it was a moving, even spiritual experience. The ranch featured a modest home of about 1,500 square feet. I remember standing behind the chair at the dining room table where President Reagan would do much of his work looking out the window at Lake Lucky
. I would not sit in the chair, would not dream of doing such a thing. But I stood probably twenty or thirty minutes behind that chair, looking out that window and soaking up the ambiance of a man I’ve admired my whole life for having the courage to stand by his deep principles and the ability to lay out a vision that transformed this country and the world.

  After the wedding, Heidi and I took a two-week honeymoon in St. Thomas. It was magical. We walked the beach every sunset, bodysurfed, and took a boat ride to nearby islands. After a year and a half on the campaign, the recount, the transition, the beginning of the administration, we were also both exhausted. The first day, we closed the drapes and slept sixteen hours. For the next two weeks, we slept between twelve and fifteen hours every night. In between, we relaxed with each other, with no cell phones and no email. Heavenly. Then we both went back to work.

  I think you could write a book on how to run a federal agency based on how Tim Muris led the Federal Trade Commission. But don’t worry, this is not that book.

  A mistake that many Republicans make in government is to view the agency they’re heading as the enemy. They view their mandate as stopping bad things at the agency. But Tim Muris understood that bureaucratic inertia is a powerful force. It is like fire; if you fight it directly, it has the potential to consume you. Tim taught me it is far more effective to shape and direct the focus rather than directly attack the career professionals.

  Most of those career professionals are good, decent, honorable people. Naturally, they are less than pleased when some political leader comes in and says, “Everything you’ve done with your life has been harmful. Stop!”

  Tim developed an aggressive positive agenda for his agency. The career professionals could focus on beneficial things, although they were often different things than one would see in a Democratic administration that constantly sought to expand government control over the economy.

  Tim and I were both strongly influenced by Robert Bork’s 1978 classic, The Antitrust Paradox. Bork decried the direction of antitrust law for empowering the government to pick winners and losers between competing businesses. It is not, Bork argued, the job of antitrust law to protect competitors. It is the job of antitrust law to protect consumers.

  Bork believed that antitrust law should be concerned not when competitors battle it out in the marketplace, but when they put down their swords and embrace arm in arm in a cartel, which allows them to cooperate with each other against consumers. That may be good for the competing companies, but it’s harmful to consumers. In 1978, what Bork was saying was radical and revolutionary.

  During my tenure at the FTC, we would constantly ask ourselves: What can we do to expand competition? To help consumers? In trying to answer these questions I learned a great deal about the anticompetitive tendencies of large corporations and industries, and about the proclivity of government to favor big business.

  For example, at the FTC I created a task force on e-commerce, with an eye toward encouraging competition on the Internet. We held three days of public hearings, considering ten different industries. In each industry, existing brick-and-mortar providers had come to government seeking barriers to entry, to prevent new competition over the Internet.

  Take contact lenses. All across the country, opticians were trying to create barriers to entry for “1-800-CONTACTS,” ostensibly because of health risks to consumers. But the principal motivation was that the eye doctors had a ready-made group of customers in their patients, and they didn’t want them going to the Internet for cheaper lenses.

  Another instance where we intervened was in litigation in Oklahoma between funeral directors and online casket sellers. The funeral directors did not like e-competition, because caskets have a huge markup. So they argued it was in the consumers’ interest for only morticians licensed in each state to be able to sell a casket.

  Consider also wine. It used to be if you wanted to have a winery, you had to have a distribution system. But now, with the Internet and shippers like FedEx, someone can grow grapes, make wine, and sell it without a single truck, warehouse, or wholesaler. In fact, Texas has grown enormously in this area, developing dozens of new wineries, which has created thousands of new jobs.

  The problem in the early 2000s was that there were extensive regulatory barriers in place to prohibit the shipping of wine across state lines—barriers the established wine industry loved because they protected them from upstart wineries. So one of the things we did at the FTC was to examine this empirically.

  I remember having a conversation with C. Boyden Gray, who was an old friend of mine and had served as the White House counsel under President George H. W. Bush. He was representing the wine wholesalers, and they were dismayed that the FTC was looking to expand competition in wine.

  One of the arguments they used was that these barriers somehow prevent underage drinking. I found that a curious argument; when I was a teenager, I didn’t see a whole lot of demand for a really dry Chardonnay (online keg sales, however, would have been a different matter). Even assuming a big underage market for wine, the barriers on interstate shipment would have an impact only if potential underage drinkers somehow had a preference for out-of-state wine, as compared to in-state wine. That made no sense.

  Nonetheless, we compiled evidence. We contacted various alcohol control boards and law enforcement officials in the states that allowed direct shipping of wine and asked if they’d seen any increase in drinking as a result of an increase in out-of-state wines. They responded, “None.”

  From contact lenses to coffins to wine, the pattern was always the same. The existing, powerful competitors lobbied their state regulators or state legislators to put up legal barriers to block anyone else from competing with them. The end result was, in the guise of helping consumers, such regulations tended to raise prices and hurt consumers.

  A few years after our e-commerce task force began, it was particularly rewarding to see the Supreme Court strike down many of the barriers to the direct interstate shipment of wine. Repeatedly, the Court cited our task force’s report.

  I enjoyed the Federal Trade Commission, but it was a far cry from what I’d hoped for after the campaign and the long, hard work on the recount. I wanted to be the equivalent of Michael J. Fox’s character in the movie The American President—the young, passionate idealist urging the president, in the heat of battle, to do the right thing.

  I desperately wanted to be a real leader in the Bush administration—to have a senior post like so many of my campaign colleagues. When that didn’t happen, and it became clear it wasn’t going to happen, it was a crushing blow.

  As a result, the first year of the Bush administration was one of the hardest of my life. But it also turned out to be one of the most important, because I couldn’t blame anyone else for my situation—if I wanted things to change I had to look inside myself.

  I think God knew what He was doing in 2001. At the tender age of thirty, I had already enjoyed a lot of success in my life, and I had foolishly come to believe in its inevitability. Campaigns are no place for candidates who think they walk on water.

  In a grassroots campaign across a state like Texas, you talk to tens of thousands of voters in IHOPs and Denny’s and VFW halls. You can come across as an arrogant little snot if you want to. But if you do, no one is going to vote for you.

  Scripture tells us that pride cometh before the fall, and that lesson was taught to me forcefully. For the first time I had set a major life goal—getting a senior job in the administration—and I had worked hard for it. And I failed miserably.

  With her usual insight, Heidi has observed that those two years changed me. Going through that experience altered my personality, and forced me to view the world differently, to treat others with greater respect and humility. It was a lesson I very much needed to learn.

  In one of my favorite country songs, Garth Brooks sings, “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers,” and with me that certainly was true. If I had been appoint
ed to a senior White House position, I would likely have become enmeshed in the many ill-fated decisions of the administration. And I certainly would have been overly impressed with myself, a failing that is all too common in Washington.

  I needed to get my teeth kicked in. And if it hadn’t happened, there’s no way I would be in the U.S. Senate today.

  * Although he was my client, I think I only met Boehner once. I was a junior lawyer in the back of the room, and I don’t recall that we spoke at all.

  * Joining the campaign required an 80 percent salary cut, a sobering decision for a twenty-eight-year-old fresh out of school. My fixed bills, including my student loans, dramatically exceeded my monthly income on the campaign. Fortunately, in my two years at Cooper & Carvin, I had saved nearly half of my salary, so I was able to live off savings during the campaign.

  CHAPTER 6

  Upholding the Law

  Well, what does he say?” asked Barry Goldwater.1

  Dean Burch turned to the white-haired Arizonan who was his friend and mentor. “He says he hasn’t been telling the truth.”2

  For the past five months of 1974, Burch had led the effort to protect the legal and political interests of Richard Milhous Nixon. Now Burch had to tell Goldwater what the senator likely already knew—the president of the United States was a liar.

  Through the agonizing weeks and months as the Republicans had mustered a defense of the embattled White House, Nixon repeatedly had told his staff, his party, and his country that he had not participated in an illegal cover-up of an illegal robbery. Until that very morning, Burch had believed him.3

  Burch arrived in Goldwater’s office in the late afternoon of August 5 to bring the senator an advance copy of the president’s latest statement about the two-year-old scandal. It addressed a tape of a conversation recorded in 1972, just a few days after five men were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s office at a then-little-known building complex called the Watergate.