Who is Heidi Cruz?
Senator’s wife is a smart businesswoman,
Her life story got a sketchy outline in her husband’s presidential announcement speech, but when they first joined forces, Heidi Cruz was as involved in Republican politics as Ted.
In his speech Monday announcing his candidacy, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz recounted his wife’s childhood during which she spent time in Africa with her missionary parents. In grade school, she started a bread- baking venture with her brother. He mentioned her reaching “the highest pinnacles” in a business career.
“And then Heidi becomes my wife and my very best friend in the world. Heidi becomes an incredible mom to our two precious little girls,” he said. The couple’s daughters, Catherine and Caroline, are ages 4 and 6, respectively.
Heidi Cruz is amanaging director at Goldman Sachs, the investment firm she joined in 2005. She runs the Houston wealth management unit, which handles portfolios for clients with an average net worth of $ 40 million. Cruz, 42, will take an unpaid leave of absence from the firm for the duration of her husband’s campaign, Goldman spokeswoman Andrea Raphael said Monday.
Before she joined Goldman, Heidi Cruz was half of a Washington power couple, working for the Bush administration.
In fact, she met her husband when the two were working on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.
Cruz initially turned down a job with Goldman after finishing Harvard Business School ( she also has a graduate degree in business from a Belgian university) in favor of the Bush campaign, where she worked on the candidate’s economic policy.
After Bush’s victory, Cruz won plum jobs with the U. S. trade representative and with Condoleezza Rice on the National Security Council. In 2004, she left Washington for Houston, so her husband could pursue elective office in Texas.
Ted Cruz has praised his wife for being willing to put all the couple’s savings — $ 1.2 million — into his 2012 Senate campaign. Heidi Cruz said in an interview in 2013 with The New York
Times that she first made him agree to raise money to show that others supported him.
“I’m not dumb,” she said. “I need to see that other people support you.”
“She’ll play very well” in the campaign, says Mark Jones, chairman of the political science department at Rice University in Houston.
Heidi Cruz will have little trouble handling the public role of candidate’s wife, says Edward Haley, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, who taught Cruz as an undergraduate and has remained close.
Demands of the campaign trail “would be easy for her,” he said. “The harder part would be the demands on time with Ted and the family.”