Few sitting U.S. senators moonlight as biographers, and fewer still choose a subject as quietly polarizing as a sitting Supreme Court justice. That’s exactly the gamble Ted Cruz makes with “Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas,” a book that trades campaign-trail rhetoric for something closer to hagiography-with-footnotes, built on hours of one-on-one access most journalists would trade a kidney for.
The premise is straightforward: Cruz, a former Thomas clerk, sat down with the justice for roughly nine hours of on-the-record conversation and used it to trace Thomas’s arc from a childhood of real poverty in segregated Georgia to three decades on the nation’s highest court. Rather than a straight biography, the book is framed as an argument — that Thomas’s willingness to be the lone dissenter, term after term, on cases where his colleagues eventually caught up to him, reflects a rare kind of judicial and personal integrity rather than the “angry loner” caricature that has followed him through Washington for years.
Where the book earns its keep is in the material only a former clerk could plausibly get. The anecdotes land with specificity — a sharp exchange with Antonin Scalia over whether Thomas was “tilting at windmills” by pushing to revisit settled precedent, quiet details about Thomas’s reading habits and his RV road trips, and Thomas’s own account of the isolation that followed his confirmation hearings. For readers already sympathetic to Thomas’s jurisprudence, these passages do what good access journalism should: they make an often-caricatured public figure legible as a person with a coherent, if contested, worldview.
Critical reception has been considerably more mixed than the warm blurbs on the jacket suggest. Several reviewers have noted that Cruz leans heavily on his own prior speeches and writing, recycling turns of phrase from earlier tributes to Thomas rather than generating fresh analysis, which blunts the book’s claim to offer new insight beyond the interview transcripts themselves. Others have pointed out the obvious structural problem: a book meant to rehabilitate Thomas’s reputation, written by an ideological ally and former employee, is never going to interrogate its subject very hard, and it mostly doesn’t — the tough questions a truly independent biographer might ask about Thomas’s ethics disclosures or his wife’s political activities get little space here. Commentators across the ideological spectrum have also drawn comparisons to Thomas’s own 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” noting how much ground the two books cover in common, which raises the question of what exactly this new volume adds beyond a fresh coat of admiration.
The verdict: “Going Further” is best approached as a primary source rather than a critical biography — valuable for the access it provides to Thomas’s own voice and memory, thin on the skepticism a more independent account would bring. Readers who already admire Thomas’s jurisprudence will find plenty to like in the personal texture Cruz has assembled. Readers hoping for a clear-eyed reckoning with one of the Court’s most consequential and controversial figures should look elsewhere — or at least pair this one with something written by someone who never worked for its subject.
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