Ted Cruz in high school: a 'prodigy' with plans for world domination

Even for some in his own party, the growing prospect of a Ted Cruz presidency is a nightmarish prospect, but no one could accuse the Texas senator of failing to give them plenty of advance warning.

Cruz confounded opinion polls by winning the Iowa Republican caucuses on Monday, but according to a vision of the future he set out nearly three decades ago, moving one step closer to the White House by beating Donald Trump merely conformed to his expectations.

“Upon graduation Ted hopes to attend Princeton University and major in Political Science and Economics. From there he wants to attend law school (possibly Harvard) and achieve a successful law practice,” said a biographical note from around 1988 about the then 17-year-old.

“He then wants to pursue his real goal – a career in politics. Ted would like to run for various political offices and eventually achieve a strong enough reputation and track record to run for – and win – President of the United States.”

After high school, Cruz went to Princeton (majoring in Public Policy), attended Harvard Law School, became a successful lawyer and was elected a US senator for Texas. He is now running for president. That’s five goals checked off – one more to go.

Cruz articulated his towering ambition less elegantly in a video that emerged on YouTube last month that combines schoolboy humour with Texas bravado. It was apparently filmed in 1988, when he was a high school senior at Second Baptist School, a Bible-centric private school in Houston – long before he arrived in Washington pledging to upend the Republican establishment.

“Aspirations? Is that like sweat on my butt?” he asks. “Well, my aspiration is to, I don’t know, be in a teen tit film like that guy who played Horatio – you know, he was in Malibu Bikini Beach Shop? Well, other than that, take over the world. World domination. Yeah, rule everything. Rich, powerful, that sort of stuff.”

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.

Storey taught a set of principles dubbed the Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom. Cruz has been especially fond of 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.” He tapped into widespread anti-big-government sentiment in his state on the way to winning a Senate seat as an underdog candidate in 2012, and he has stuck to this theme.

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.

If this sounds like the sort of hobby unlikely to make him a sought-after guest at parties, the young Cruz would have agreed. As he was formulating a political outlook that has barely wavered since – enabling his current self-branding as a consistent, bold conservative – he was also hatching a plan to develop a likable personality.

“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.”

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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.

“Second Baptist had a culture where being an academic was about on par with being a star athlete. That school was chock full of children of high achievers who already knew they wanted to follow the same path and how important education was to that goal.”

Cruz’s English teacher and guidance counsellor, Elsa Jean Looser, now 76, said he was a “dream student” interested in literature, history and government. “We all knew he had political ambitions simply because of the direction he was taking. He wanted to do well in all his classes, which he did; he wanted to go to fine schools; he wanted to build a good resumé.

“He was a tremendous debater. His whole life was just being directed that way. There was no question he was aspiring to be a lawyer and then move into the political arena,” she said. “He gets bad press, which is so sad because he’s just doing what he said he would do.”

Another school friend, Zachary Emmanouil, even credited Cruz with saving his life after a vacation incident in Cancun, Mexico, where the Cruz family had a timeshare. Emmanouil recalled by email that he became strangely dizzy after drinking a rum and Coke at a bar and suspects his drink was spiked by thieves who wanted to steal his gold jewellery.

“I had made it to the condo property, but I became so dizzy that I was lying right next to the pool, chest down, with one arm in the water. I could have easily moved to the side and fallen and drowned in the pool. Ted was shorter and thinner than me, but he ran over to me, lifted me, and placed me in one of those reclining chairs next to the pool,” he said.

“I remember hearing Ted scooping water with his hands from the pool and splashing it on to my face. I also remember Ted repeatedly wanting to call a doctor, but I kept telling him, ‘No, no, I’m better now.’ Ted told me something like, ‘OK, Zachary, but I’m not leaving your side until you’re absolutely sure that you’re okay.’ Ted never left my side – Ted stayed with me outside in the pool area until the sun came up and I started feeling much better. You could say that Ted saved my life.”

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.

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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.

“When we are introduced, it is the first time I feel as if someone has sized me up, found me wanting and moved on … all before I finish ‘hello’. It is not a good feeling. I don’t think I’m going to like Ted,” she wrote in an article on Medium last month.

“I remember that vividly,” she said at a coffee shop in Houston on Tuesday. “An 18-year-old girl in a suburban, small-ish town – I’d never been so quickly summed up like that before.”

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.

Her politics have since skewed to the left, and the personalised licence plate on her SUV reads – using the six letters typical to Texas – “HILARY” in tribute to Hillary Clinton. Seeing Trump and Cruz sparring for the Republican presidential nomination is “vastly entertaining in a heartbreaking kind of way”, she said. “It’s like Stephen Colbert [quoting former Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham] said: ‘Do you want to die by poisoning or firing squad?’”

Cruz was not universally admired at university, either. Craig Mazin, the Hollywood screenwriter of The Hangover Part II and Part III, spent much of the 24 hours after Cruz’s Iowa triumph issuing Twitter jabs at the man who was his freshman roommate at Princeton.

“I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone,” Mazin told the Daily Beast in 2013. “I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”