When Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., roasted the entire 2016 presidential field during a congressional dinner at the Washington Press Club Foundation in late February, the former presidential contender hit Sen. Ted Cruz particularly hard, saying, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”

The crowd roared with laughter, but the sarcastic joke pointed to a serious reality: Cruz hasn’t made many friends in the Senate. Last summer, on the Senate floor, he accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., of lying to his colleagues, and he’s called senators from both parties members of “the Washington cartel.”

Many Senate Republicans criticized Cruz for his defund-Obamacare efforts in 2013, which led to a government shutdown. The attempt brought national attention to Cruz when he spoke for 21 hours on the Senate floor. Then-Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a staunch fiscal conservative, said Cruz created “a false hope” over a tactic bound to fail—and after the two-week shutdown, Congress passed the funding bill anyway.

John Hart, Coburn’s former communications director, told The Washington Post: “It’s a classic show-horse versus workhorse dynamic. It’s putting his own political ambition ahead of the interests of the country.” Other critics include Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who called Cruz “a wacko bird,” and former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who called him “a jackass.”

By late March, though, Lindsey Graham was tepidly supporting Cruz, calling him a better alternative than Donald Trump. One other senator, Mike Lee, R-Utah, had endorsed Cruz in his race with Trump and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Then, in a bizarre twist, a gossipy sex story in a tabloid pushed this dismal campaign season even lower (see sidebar).

What’s Ted Cruz really like? Earlier last month, I interviewed many who know Cruz well outside the Senate and discovered a side major media have neglected: Yes, Cruz is ambitious, but not necessarily always for personal gain. Yes, he’s driven—but he has helped others to drive as well.

WHEN DAVID PANTON ARRIVED AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY in the fall of 1988, the freshman from Jamaica felt overwhelmed: Panton was 16, new to the United States, and didn’t know anyone at the Ivy League school. During the first week, he met Cruz: “He really changed my entire trajectory.” The 17-year-old freshman from Texas befriended Panton and encouraged him to join the debate team.

Over the next four years, Cruz and Panton became two of the top debaters in the country. They also became roommates. Other students would drop by to play board games like Risk or watch movies like The Princess Bride. Cruz would also pore over debate scores and strategize how to make a better argument next time. “My knowledge of the Constitution was sorely lacking,” Panton says: “That changed when I met Ted.”

Cruz had already been poring over the Constitution. As a high-school student, he joined The Free Enterprise Institute and studied conservative economic theory. In a spinoff program, he memorized provisions of the Constitution using a mnemonic method he displayed for The Atlantic in 2014: “TCC NCC PCC PAWN MaMa WReN. Taxes, credit, commerce, naturalization, coinage, counterfeiting, post office, copyright, courts, piracy, Army, war, Navy, militia, money for militia, Washington (D.C.) rules, and necessary and proper.”

At Princeton, his constitutional grasp impressed his teachers. Robert George, a rare conservative professor there, advised Cruz on his thesis: a study of the Ninth and 10th Amendments. George says he ranks Cruz “in the top 5 percent” of all the students he’s taught, but Cruz didn’t seem arrogant in classroom settings. He says Cruz asked about opposing viewpoints, didn’t engage in “intellectual pyrotechnics,” didn’t mistreat other students he debated, and “was always very decent.”

Cruz’s friends weren’t only conservatives. Robert Marks headed the liberal branch of the school’s debate society when Cruz led the conservative side, but the two became friends. “I wasn’t really familiar with conservative views,” he says. “I learned a lot about a conservative viewpoint.” Marks says he’s perplexed by a handful of media reports saying Cruz didn’t have many friends in college, but he acknowledges Cruz’s penchant for debate may have come across as arrogant to some students.

Panton, Marks, and Cruz ended up at Harvard Law School together. They remain friends. When Marks moved to Washington, D.C., a few years ago, he was working long hours and didn’t know anyone in town. Marks says Cruz met him for lunch and offered to introduce him to a few locals. The new friends became a social lifeline. “For him it wasn’t a big deal,” says Marks: “For me it was a huge deal.” Marks remains a liberal and a Democrat, so he doesn’t plan to vote for Cruz, but he says their political differences have never affected their friendship.

When Cruz was traveling in Iowa last February, Panton’s father lay dying of cancer: Cruz took a break from the campaign to call the elder Panton two days before he died.

THE FRIENDS WENT IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS after graduating from Harvard, and Cruz worked for the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. When the contest led to a recount, the 29-year-old served on the legal team. He hoped his hard work would yield a senior post in the Bush administration, but he admits in his autobiography, A Time for Truth, that he was “far too cocky for my own good” and “burned a fair number of bridges.” After staffers found him abrasive, Cruz ended up with a less desirable assignment at the Department of Justice.

The disappointment was short-lived. In 2002, he learned about an opening for solicitor general in his home state of Texas. Barry McBee, then first assistant attorney general, remembers the weekend Cruz interviewed for the position. He says other candidates had more experience, but Cruz stood out for his potential: The young attorney outlined a plan to help the state engage on a national level.

Part of the strategy: Look for cases in other states Texas could join to help influence legal precedents on a national scale. During his 5½-year stint as solicitor general, Cruz argued eight cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and filed some 70 amicus briefs. He largely focused on conservative ideas: gun rights, upholding the death penalty, defending religious monuments on government property. The profile of the office—and Cruz—rose.

Was this a plan for Cruz to raise his own national profile as a steppingstone to a higher office? McBee says: “He was ambitious. That wasn’t a hidden attribute”—but Cruz’s plan dovetailed with what Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (now Texas governor) wanted on a state level. McBee says Cruz worked as hard as the attorneys he managed, sometimes pulling all-nighters with his team. When Cruz attended meetings with his bosses about cases he was managing, McBee says, it was rare for him not to mention the other lawyers assisting: “He didn’t try to get all the glory.”

During this time, Cruz also volunteered to help a group of conservative professors at The University of Texas at Austin who were trying to start a Western civilization program at the mostly non-conservative school. Robert Koons, a philosophy professor, says Cruz showed up for quarterly meetings for about two years and helped the modest group plan strategy: “It was pure philanthropic motivation on his part. There was no self-interest.”

CRUZ MET HIS WIFE, HEIDI, during the 2000 campaign. They married the next year. But as Cruz excelled at work, his personal life faced strain. When he moved to Austin to take the solicitor general job less than two years after he married, his wife stayed 1,500 miles behind to keep her government position in Washington, D.C.

They tried to see each other most weekends, but Cruz wrote in his autobiography it was “hard on a young marriage.” They eventually decided Heidi would move to Texas, but she took a banking job in Houston, not Austin. They had a shorter commute for visits, but still lived apart during the week. For a time, Heidi struggled with depression. “Two professionals, how you coordinate two careers—it’s very complicated,” Ted Cruz told The Washington Post. “And we worked through it as a team.”

Heidi did improve, but the couple lived in separate cities until she moved to Austin in 2008. (She still commuted to Houston for work during the week.) In 2010, the whole family moved to Houston, where Cruz had taken a job as a private attorney. The next year, the couple had their second daughter, and Heidi soon became a managing director at Goldman Sachs.

Cruz spent about two years as a Houston lawyer before running for the U.S. Senate, but still pursued constitutional causes. When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Brooke Rollins of the Texas Public Policy Foundation said, she called Cruz and asked how to push back against it. Cruz suggested Rollins’ group start a 10th Amendment initiative to educate legislators and the public on federal overreach and the importance of states’ rights.

Rollins asked Cruz if he would help. At a time he was making more than $1 million as an attorney, according to Cruz’s financial disclosure records, Rollins says he donated “hundreds of hours” of time to help start the effort and “never asked to be paid.” He wrote a series of papers for the foundation, gave speeches, and met with local leaders.

Cruz won an unlikely Republican primary victory in 2012 over then-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and rode a wave of tea party fervor into the Senate. Post-election, Cruz did not forget at least some of the groups he had courted. In 2013 Tim Lambert of the Texas Homeschool Coalition invited Cruz to speak at the homeschool group’s annual gala. Cruz donned a black tie and mingled with the high-school debate team after his speech. “Let’s face it,” Lambert said, “there’s really nothing in that for you, especially six months after you’ve been elected.”

The Texans I spoke with applauded Cruz’s aggressive style in the Senate. Michael Sullivan of the fiscally conservative Empower Texans says voters wanted someone to challenge the system, not go along with it: “It’s wrong and foolish to be for something you’re against. If it’s bad, it’s bad.” Sullivan also doesn’t worry much about Cruz offending higher-ranking senators: “No one likes the kid who points out the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.”

That’s how Cruz has framed his presidential campaign. He’s continued to call for an end to Obamacare and has spoken about the importance of defending religious liberty. He’s vigorously called for defunding abortion giant Planned Parenthood and for stronger immigration enforcement.

He’s also spent the last three years cultivating the image of an outsider from the Washington establishment. Sometimes, that’s meant distancing himself from leaders he once praised, like Chief Justice John Roberts and former President George W. Bush.

IT’S ALSO MEANT INTENSIFYING HIS FOCUS on evangelical Christians. Rollins of the Texas Public Policy Foundation says Cruz isn’t a “Johnny-come-lately” when it comes to speaking about his Christian faith. But Cruz has amplified his approach. In 2013, Cruz said a politician should “avoid ostentatiously wrapping yourself in your faith because I think in politics it’s too easy ... for that to be politically useful.” But early this year Cruz, a Southern Baptist, told Iowa voters to pray every day before the caucuses for God to “continue this awakening, continue this revival. Awaken the body of Christ that we may pull back from the abyss.”

Paul Miller, a University of Texas at Austin professor and a fellow at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, supported Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., during the primary season. Miller—who now hopes Cruz prevails over Trump—said Cruz’s mixture of religion and politics has troubled him. He doesn’t think Cruz is a theocrat, but he does think the senator uses “Christian identity politics” to frame his candidacy as particularly advantageous to one group of voters.

“Can’t we have a candidate who tries to speak in a principled way and explain why this approach to policy is just for all people?” asks Miller. The professor says he’d like to see Cruz make an appeal to all voters by placing more emphasis on the Constitution—the very area where Cruz likely has more expertise than any other candidate in the field.

Cruz has spoken about the Constitution during his campaign, but in a 2014 interview with the Texas Monthly, he made the point clearer: “My personal faith is something that’s integral to who I am, [but] the proper basis for public policy should derive not from the personal religious views of the officeholder but from principles of individual liberty and our Constitution.”

Sadly, this election cycle hasn’t been a year of serious discussions of constitutional issues. Instead, it’s been dominated by news of Trump’s outrageous insults and overblown campaign promises. But the tumultuous campaign has confirmed the view enunciated by James Madison, and emphasized by Cruz, about why a country desperately needs a Constitution as a standard: “Men are not angels.”

To run or not to run?

WORLD National Editor Jamie Dean had researched and largely written our story about Ted Cruz when vicious gossip hit the headlines: The National Enquirer ran a story claiming Cruz had committed adultery with five women.

Cruz said the article—which offered no names or evidence—was “absolute garbage” and “complete and utter lies.” One of the women pictured in blurred-out images called the charges “tabloid trash” and “utterly false.” A second woman pictured had a similar reaction: “trash and 100 percent false.”

The timing of these charges temporarily left WORLD in a quandary. During her research, Jamie Dean had heard many personal positives about Cruz, but did we want to go to press with a largely favorable cover story as charges of misconduct floated around? What if some proof emerged?

We considered the source. A stopped clock tells the accurate time every 12 hours, and the Enquirer has been right once in 12 or more years: It did expose the adultery of 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards. It has also run false smears of hundreds of public figures. Since the National Enquirer backs Donald Trump and its CEO, David Pecker, is a Trump pal, this particular attack is doubly suspicious.

We considered the context. I grew up in Massachusetts and as a teenager witnessed Boston’s brutal, eye-gouging political campaigns, but I’ve never seen anything like this year’s ongoing Republican presidential reality show. It has given new life to the adage, “When you think it can’t go any lower, it does.”

We take seriously our responsibility to let readers know about the character of presidential contenders as well as their policies, and we follow the Bible in taking adultery seriously—but we also considered the story itself, including its utter lack of evidence and the implausibility of its scenarios.

We thought about not running the cover story you see, because it is possible we will be embarrassed later, but it became clear that changing our plans because of the Enquirer story would be giving in to evil. —Marvin Olasky

Listen to Jamie Dean and Mary Reichard discuss this article on The World and Everything in It.