Sen. Ted Cruz is betting that the full story of Justice Clarence Thomas, from rural Georgia poverty to the nation's longest-tenured sitting justice, is one most Americans have never actually heard, and he spent nine hours with Thomas to tell it.
Cruz, R-Texas, appeared on Newsmax's "The Record With Greta Van Susteren" to discuss his new 336-page book, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas, published by Sentinel the day before. The book draws on exclusive sit-down interviews Cruz conducted with the 78-year-old justice, conversations the senator says cover Thomas' childhood, his intellectual formation, and three decades of Supreme Court opinions that have reshaped American constitutional law.
Cruz told Newsmax the project has three aims: recount Thomas' life and the adversity he faced, trace the intellectual journey that made him a conservative originalist, and break down his jurisprudence for readers who are not lawyers.
"I think Justice Thomas is one of the most consequential people to have ever lived. He has an extraordinary personal story. And it's a story that I think Americans need to know, that they need to hear."
That is a bold claim. But Cruz builds it on a biography that reads less like a Washington résumé and more like a story about grit, loss, and self-reliance, the kind of story that used to be held up as the American ideal before the cultural gatekeepers decided it was inconvenient.
Cruz told Van Susteren that understanding Thomas starts not with the Supreme Court but with a man named Myers Anderson, Thomas' grandfather, who operated a fuel-oil delivery business in rural Georgia.
Anderson could not read or create. But he demanded that Thomas and his younger brother work alongside him, sometimes starting at three or four in the morning. He would not let them wear gloves while hauling fuel oil in cold weather. He insisted on hard work and personal responsibility. And he pushed Thomas to read, a discipline Anderson himself never mastered.
Cruz put it simply:
"If you want to understand Clarence Thomas, you have to understand Myers Anderson."
Thomas has spoken publicly about his grandfather's influence before, including in rare personal appearances where he recalled the promises he made when his grandparents died. The new book, Cruz says, fills in the details that Thomas' own autobiography, My Grandfather's Son, left out, because that memoir ended with his Supreme Court confirmation in 1991.
What came after 1991 is the heart of Cruz's project. Thomas has now served more than 30 years on the bench, making him the second-longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history, behind only William O. Douglas. His opinions on originalism, federalism, and individual liberty have shaped, and often anticipated, the direction of American law.
Cruz's book traces a path that few Americans know in full. Thomas grew up in what Cruz described as abject poverty in rural Georgia, facing racism that the senator says marked his early life. Thomas entered a seminary intending to become a Catholic priest but left after growing disillusioned with what he saw as the church's inadequate response to racial discrimination.
He went on to the College of the Holy Cross and then Yale Law School. Along the way, in 1970, he participated in an anti-war riot in Harvard Square, a detail that complicates the caricature of Thomas as a lifelong movement conservative. His intellectual journey, Cruz argues, was not a straight line. It was forged through experience and disillusionment.
At Yale, Thomas crossed paths with a young John Bolton, the future U.N. ambassador. Bolton found Thomas' lost wallet and returned it, and the two struck up a friendship despite holding different political views at the time. Cruz includes the anecdote as part of a broader portrait of Thomas as someone whose relationships and convictions were shaped outside the usual ideological pipelines.
Thomas has long rejected the idea that his race should dictate his politics. That refusal has made him a target for decades, from his brutal confirmation fight to the present day.
Thomas' 1991 confirmation remains one of the most contentious in Supreme Court history. Law professor Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, allegations Thomas denied. The Senate confirmed him 52-48, with 11 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote in his favor.
Cruz's book picks up where that fight left off. Thomas' autobiography covered the confirmation ordeal but stopped there. Going Further is meant to document the three decades of work that followed, the opinions, the dissents, the intellectual framework that Cruz says ordinary Americans deserve to understand without needing a law degree.
Cruz told Van Susteren:
"What I do in this book is try to explain 30 years of his jurisprudence, which is some of the most consequential jurisprudence of any Supreme Court justice. You don't have to be a lawyer to read this book. You don't have to be a constitutional law expert."
That framing matters. Thomas' critics in the legal academy and in the media have spent years trying to reduce him to a caricature, a silent justice, a follower, a man whose racial identity is questioned because his conclusions do not match the approved script. Cruz's book is a direct counter to that narrative, built not on opinion columns but on the justice's own words across nine hours of recorded conversation.
Whether one agrees with Thomas' jurisprudence or not, the factual record is hard to dismiss. He has served longer than all but one justice in the Court's history. His dissents on issues from gun rights to federal agency power have, in several cases, become majority positions years later. He has spoken bluntly about the hostility conservatives face in elite legal institutions, a claim that draws pushback but that few serious observers deny outright.
The book's publication comes at a moment when the Supreme Court remains at the center of American political conflict. Thomas himself has been the subject of sustained criticism from the left, and his clashes with fellow justices, including a heated exchange with Justice Jackson over birthright citizenship, have kept him in the headlines.
Cruz is making a straightforward wager: that if Americans hear the full story, the poverty, the grandfather who could not read but demanded excellence, the seminary, the riot, the lost wallet, the confirmation, and 30 years of consequential opinions, they will see a man whose life and work deserve more than the two-dimensional treatment they usually receive.
The left has spent decades trying to define Clarence Thomas. Cruz handed him the microphone for nine hours and let him define himself.
