Today, Cruz talks about his father so much that as his political star has risen, so has Rafael's. At the age of 74, the elder Cruz is now a Tea Party celebrity, a sought-out speaker who likens Obama to Castro ("that old bearded friend I left behind in Cuba") and whose words are often rebroadcast by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. For Ted, this recognition has been the most enjoyable by-product of his own political success. "I've really had two heroes in my life," he says. "My father and Ronald Reagan."

But there's one part of Rafael's story that Cruz purposefully omits, and it might be the most affecting—and offers perhaps the most revealing window into Ted's own youthful determination. Cruz's father had started an oil and gas exploration business, then moved with his wife to Calgary, where Ted was born. (Cruz's supporters say—and most legal experts agree—that his Canadian birth would not be an obstacle should he ever run for the White House, since, by dint of his mother's American citizenship, he qualifies as a natural-born American citizen.) In 1974 the family followed the oil business to the Houston suburbs, where Ted would enjoy a typical American adolescence. But then, in the '80s, when Ted was in high school, the oil industry briefly cratered, and his father's business tumbled down with it. He went bankrupt. Eventually his marriage crumbled as well. 

When I brought up the bankruptcy one afternoon in Cruz's office—I had learned about it from one of his college friends—his face fell and he grew quiet. After a moment, he let out a long sigh and acknowledged that this was true. "My father poured all of my parents' personal assets into the company, and demand for oil and gas exploration just disappeared, because oil prices dropped so low. There's a whole generation of people in the energy industry at that time that just lost everything." 

Instead of derailing Cruz's sky-high ambitions, his father's financial calamity only intensified his drive. In the middle of his junior year, he persuaded his parents to take him out of the high school he was attending—a small evangelical school that met in a former Handy Dan hardware store—and send him to a more academically rigorous Baptist academy. 

By then Cruz had already fallen under the spell of a conservative impresario named Rolland Storey, a onetime vaudevillian and retired natural-gas executive who ran a Houston-area think tank called the Free Enterprise Institute. At the institute, Cruz studied right-wing icons Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He also mastered a mnemonic version of the Constitution, which he'd recite, along with four other high school students, for Kiwanis, Rotary, and other civic clubs across Texas. They performed as a troupe called the Constitutional Corroborators.

Princeton turned out to be as alien to Cruz as Austin had been to his father some thirty years earlier: "I did not know anybody there; I didn't know anybody who had gone there." Like his father, he needed to earn tuition money. Unlike his father, he didn't do it by washing dishes. He got a job with the Princeton Review, teaching test-prep classes.

The elite academic circles that Cruz was now traveling in began to rub off. As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn't been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz's law-school roommates: "He said he didn't want anybody from 'minor Ivies' like Penn or Brown."*

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Ted Cruz blew his first big shot in politics. Back in 2000, he had scored a plum assignment working in the policy shop of George W. Bush's Austin-based presidential campaign. He distinguished himself in the weeks after the election, serving on the legal team that helped Bush win the Florida recount and, by extension, the White House. He seemed destined for a meaty job in the new administration. 

But Cruz's personal style earned him many detractors in BushWorld. He was infamous for firing off mundane work e-mails in the middle of the night—it happened so often that some in the Bush campaign suspected him of writing them ahead of time and programming his computer to send while he was asleep. He was also known for dispatching regular updates on his accomplishments that one recipient likened to "the cards people send about their families at Christmas, except Ted's were only about him and were more frequent." When it came time to divvy up the spoils of victory, many of Cruz's campaign colleagues headed to the White House; Cruz went to Washington, too—but he was exiled to the outer Siberia of the Federal Trade Commission. Says one friend: "He was pretty crushed."

Cruz lasted two years at the FTC, then returned to Austin and was appointed Texas's solicitor general. His new boss, the state's attorney general, wanted to use the office as a platform for advancing conservative legal theories on politically charged issues such as religion and state's rights. Cruz was the perfect instrument for such a mission. Although he lost that first Supreme Court case, he went on to win four of his next eight, including the landmark Medellín v. Texas, affirming—in defiance of an international court ruling as well as an order from President Bush—the state's right to execute a Mexican citizen who'd participated in the gang rape and murder of two teenage girls in Houston. Legal publications hailed him as one of the finest appellate attorneys in America. He was being talked up for a federal judgeship, possibly even the Supreme Court one day.