Who Is The Real Heidi Nelson Cruz?

As the nation says “Goodbye” to Nancy Reagan – a woman widely admired as the quintessential political wife – we pause to ask: Who is Heidi Nelson Cruz?

Watching any Ted Cruz political advertisement featuring his wife and two young daughters, we could easily get the impression that Heidi Nelson Cruz, like Nancy Reagan, is a devoted wife dedicated to making sure she and her husband occupy the White House.

The New York Times in an article published on Jan. 18, described Heidi Cruz as “a political wife,” who had become a force in her husband’s presidential contest, “an all-purpose surrogate and strategist to be deployed as often as possible.”

Heidi is herself a high-powered Bush insider, who served as deputy to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice before signing on as a Deputy to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, neocon stalwart and former Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. Zoellick wired a cushy job for Heidi when she landed at Goldman Sachs as a partner. Goldman would, of course, go on to make a secret $1 million loan to fund Ted’s U.S. Senate campaign while both Cruzes lied about the source of funds being Heidi’s retirement savings.

Yet, investigating more deeply, Ted and Heidi Cruz have had a sometimes troubled relationship punctuated by bouts of physical separation that began when two young Christians on the fringe of protestant evangelicalism met while working on the Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign.

Ted and Heidi began their married years as a Washington-insider “power couple,” before Ted left Heidi to continue her investment banking career in Washington while Ted returned to Texas to pursue his political ambitions.

A Pentecostal marries a Seventh-day Adventist

Ted, who first came to Jesus Christ as a Pentecostal, was born in Canada in 1970, to two parents who met in Louisiana and re-married in 1969, after their first marriages ended in divorce. Ted’s father, today a Cuban-born preacher, moved to Calgary, Alberta, with his second wife – Ted’s mother – to work in the Canadian oil fields.

Ted’s mother, Eleanor Darragh, was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She met Rafael in Louisiana where she was working as a computer programmer in the oil industry. Eleanor had first moved south to Houston, Texas to study mathematics at Rice University following the breakup of her first marriage and the tragic death of her first child, born to the husband she divorced.

When Ted was three years old, his father got on an airplane and flew back to Texas, abandoning his wife and son.

“When I was 3, my father decided to leave my mother and me,” Ted occasionally explains. “We were living in Calgary at the time, he got on a plane and he flew back to Texas, and he decided he didn’t want to be married anymore and he didn’t want to be a father to his 3-year-old son.”

Eventually reconciled in Texas, Rafael and Eleanor Darragh Cruz continued their troubled marriage through the 1970s, plagued by alcohol and infidelity, with a divorce in 1997, two years after Ted finished law school at Harvard.

Heidi’s family history, while less raucous, starts with her being born in 1972, to missionary parents in San Luis Obispo, where her mother, a dental hygienist, meet her father, a practicing dentist.

Raised a Seventh-day Adventist, Kenya was one of the many countries young Heidi remembered as home as she traveled around the world with her preacher parents on their missionary quest.

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