Her career took off. When Cruz moved to a job at the Department of the Treasury in 2002, she worked with the economist Brock Blomberg on the Latin America desk, shaping policy in response to the emerging market crises of the time. “I never thought of her as a true believer in the sense that she was very ideological,” Blomberg recalled. Instead, she distinguished herself with a tenacious drive and a tireless work ethic. “The one thing I can say is she’s a very earnest person. Whenever she had an opportunity, she gave it 100%.”
Then, in 2003, Cruz was appointed director of Western Hemisphere on the National Security Council, reporting directly to Condoleezza Rice — exactly the kind of job she had been working toward since she carried textbooks across Claremont’s campus. Cruz was viewed by many inside the White House as a rising star, and it seemed likely that she would continue to rise if Bush were re-elected.
Things hadn’t been going as well for the other Cruz in the Bush administration. After the campaign, Ted had landed with a thud at the Federal Trade Commission — a low-profile post far away from the action that offered little excitement for someone with his ambition. When he was offered the position of Texas solicitor general — a gig that would place him center stage in federal courtrooms, delivering forceful conservative arguments on behalf of the Lone Star State — it was a no-brainer. Ted moved back to Austin to begin making his name as a litigator, while Heidi stayed in Washington for her dream job at the White House. For more than a year, they maintained a long-distance marriage, flying back and forth on weekends and holidays.
One day in 2004, professor Haley, who had been spending some time at a Washington think tank, invited the Cruzes over for brunch. “Heidi said she was going back to Texas with Ted, and that he wanted to run for statewide office there, and it was too hard to maintain two homes,” he recalled. Haley struggled to conceal his disappointment that his star pupil was walking away from the dream job they’d spent so much time planning for.
“Had she not been married, and free to choose, I think she would have stayed for three more years,” he said. “My sense is she really loved what she was doing and chose to go back to Ted so that she could help him campaign … She was sorry to go, and reconciled to going.”
Upon returning to Texas, Cruz took a job as a vice president at Goldman Sachs in Houston. But after several years away from Wall Street, she felt out of practice and anxious about proving herself to her colleagues and subordinates — some of whom, she suspected, questioned her abilities, as she described at length in a panel discussion years later. She also quickly found that Houston’s finance scene was considerably less accommodating to high-powered women than those of Washington or Manhattan.
“When I came out of Washington and the White House, I didn’t feel that there was really a glass ceiling in the administration … and Texas was very different,” she would later say in a 2011 panel discussion. She was the only woman in Goldman’s Houston office, and described fumbling with hunting lingo during conversations with male clients. In the “very traditional culture” where she lived, few of the women in their social circles had careers.
And building financial models for the profit of a major investment bank wasn’t the same as trying to improve markets in poor Latin American countries. Asked years later whether she missed the public sector after leaving it in 2004, she responded, “I’m always quite honest in my answer so I have to say that I really do … I think there is an important role to making a profit and doing so through a pretty definable skill set, and you can certainly impact industry. But to impact countries rather than companies, individually, is exciting and so I miss that component to it.”
These were some of the frustrations weighing on Cruz during the “professional transition” in 2005 that would, according to the senator’s office, lead her late one August night to the grass by an expressway onramp. This period had been a sharp detour for a woman who had carefully plotted a career path she believed would enable her to serve the public and do good in the world.
) when dude is a straight nut lol.
at these dudes doing this entire episode like it's a wrap already.
