His near-perfect score on the LSAT helped him fulfill a dream of going to Harvard Law School.
.. Melissa Hart agreed to give Cruz a ride from New York, where Cruz was at the end of the summer, back to Cambridge. She didn’t know him well, but he sought her out after she had been given a prestigious award for first-year students.
“We hadn’t left Manhattan before he asked my IQ,” Hart said. “When I told him I didn’t know, he asked, ‘Well, what’s your SAT score? That’s closely coordinated with your IQ.’ ”
.. A former roommate told the magazine GQ recently that Cruz preferred to study only with graduates of Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, dismissing the rest as “the minor Ivies.”
.. If the game was hearts, his signature move was to “shoot the moon,” the game’s riskiest, showiest, and most aggressive maneuver.
“It’s hard to execute,” said Charles Morse, a law school friend. “Ted was fond of that.”
If the game was poker, he put all his chips on the table.
“He would go all in sometimes . . . and you’d never know if he’s bluffing,” said Alexander Acosta, another friend. “He’s someone who’s willing to take risks.”
.. Cruz’s beliefs are no different now, and when it came to taxation classmates recall him arguing that the government was stealing money from the rich and giving it to the poor.
.. Ted Cruz was, and in many ways still is, an actor.
In high school, he says, he considered dropping out and moving to California to pursue an acting career. His parents talked him out of it.
.. Cruz was so driven to secure a clerkship that he resolved to learn tennis, since Rehnquist, an avid player, was known to organize weekly matches with his clerks.
The Ted Cruz Establishment
The Counter Establishment is now nearly as financially flush and institutionally entrenched as the mainstream establishment. Cruz has been able to tap into it to raise gobs of money. In the third quarter, Cruz raised $12.2 million, about twice what rival Marco Rubio raised over the same period. His super PACs raised $31 million in the few weeks of his campaign, largely from hedge fund manager Robert Mercer. He’s had fund-raisers hosted by Joseph Konzelmann, a managing director at Goldman Sachs.
.. As Eliana Johnson of National Review put it, the paradox of Cruz is that “The man who boasts of his ideological purity is perhaps the most obviously tactical candidate.”
.. Ted Cruz is surging as the figurehead of the rich and interlocked Counter Establishment. And he gets to do it while pretending that he is antiestablishment. That’s a nice trick. Even a Machiavellian one.
Ted Cruz Sees Boon to His Campaign in Donald Trump
Speaking to donors in New York City on Wednesday, Mr. Cruz suggested a more strategic reason to be grateful: Mr. Trump is bending the race in Mr. Cruz’s direction.
“He has framed the central narrative of this primary as, ‘Who will stand up to Washington?’” Mr. Cruz, of Texas, said at the private fund-raiser, echoing remarks he has made publicly. “Now if that’s the central narrative, the natural next question is, ‘O.K., who has stood up to Washington?’”
Mr. Trump, in this view, has taken a machete through the brush for Mr. Cruz, allowing him to rise quietly despite his own reputation for bombast, while Mr. Trump absorbs the scrutiny a front-runner attracts and eventually peters out, as Mr. Cruz has wagered.
Ted Cruz’s Laughable Disguise
HIS greatest distinction as a lawmaker thus far has been his readiness to pursue lost causes that draw attention from a news media that he supposedly loathes, and to skirmish with party colleagues in a way that similarly puts him front and center on TV and prompts headlines about him.
.. During the most recent debate, he twice disparaged the people in Washington who set monetary policy as haughty, disconnected “philosopher-kings.”
From such cunningly chosen, strategically deployed words, you’d never guess that Cruz was known at Harvard Law School for a reluctance to “study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale,” according to a 2013 profile of Cruz in GQ by Jason Zengerle.
.. One of Cruz’s law-school roommates, Damon Watson, told Zengerle: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”
.. But after that all-night, 21-hour protest of Obamacare — you know, when he stood on the Senate floor and managed to quote country-western lyrics, muse about “Duck Dynasty” and read “Green Eggs and Ham” aloud — he was photographed being driven away in a B.M.W.