That’s the title of a recent post by Neo-neocon. The friendship she has in mind is the one between the Republican presidential candidate and a Jamaican named David Panton. She quotes a Jamaican newspaper describing how the two met at Princeton:
The two were teenagers when they first met, assigned to live in the same freshman dorm at Princeton. They were an “unlikely couple,” Panton said last year to a radio station in Atlanta, where he now lives. Cruz was a deeply conservative Hispanic from a poor background while Panton, who is black, hailed from the upper crust of Jamaican society, where his father ran one of the island’s largest companies.
“Coming from a small school in a small town in Jamaica, I was young and felt both academically and culturally overwhelmed,” Panton told The Washington Post. “Ted was extremely pleasant and friendly and expressed genuine interest in my background.”
Cruz and Panton shared the love of a good argument and decided together to join Princeton’s competitive debate team, he said. Some classmates were baffled by the relationship between two people with seemingly opposite personalities. Panton, with his lilting Jamaican accent, exuded charm and made friends easily. Cruz was combative, developed few friendships and earned some lifelong enemies.
She quotes an interview with Alan Dershowitz describing their relationship after they both moved on to Harvard Law School:
[Cruz and Panton] sat next to each other … two of the most brilliant guys at Harvard Law school. And they were inseparable. And they had a team tag match. One guy finished, the other guy would raise his hand.
She quotes another newspaper article describing how their friendship has endured:
Panton became Cruz’s best man at his wedding, whilst Cruz became godfather to Panton’s son with Lisa Hanna.
Check out the whole thing, especially the photo of Panton and Cruz in their student days. As one commentor says, “Ted was much better looking as a college student. But then that happens to a lot of us…”.
