![]() And it is more than likely that an Army general would have explained it in those terms to a teen-ager from inner-city Detroit whom he wanted to recruit. Much has been made of Carson’s saying that he was offered a West Point scholarship, given that there is no cost for attending, but in that sense everybody who goes gets a scholarship. ![]() Politico notes that Westmoreland was not in Detroit that Memorial Day, but he was in Detroit in February, 1969, for a banquet a lot like the one Carson describes. (Similarly, if you diagram the hoax-exam story, it sounds like it happened when he was a junior, not a freshman.) But the individual parts are not only plausible but have some real backup. This happens a lot when Carson tells stories or lays out plans, and it is a real point of criticism. The jumbled way that the book is written can suggest that we are in a time loop. There is a Memorial Day parade “at the end of my twelfth grade,” which would have been May, 1969, in Detroit, which he marched in “afterward,” an encounter with General William Westmoreland at a banquet that celebrated Medal of Honor winners and, “later,” an offer of “a full scholarship to West Point,” which he “didn’t refuse … outright,” and is mainly presented as important because it gives him confidence going into the college-admissions process-which happens at the beginning of twelfth grade, not the end-and the faith, in “the fall of 1968,” to apply only to a single college, Yale. Carson presents a series of vignettes related to his high-school career, during which he was active in R.O.T.C., and to his college-admissions decisions. “Gifted Hands” can be a confusing book, because the narrative jumps back and forth in the timeline. This line of attack, with its undertones of élitism, is not likely to do him any damage with his supporters.Īnother exposé, by Politico, about whether Carson was offered admission to West Point-he never seems to have formally applied-fell flat for what are, at root, similar reasons. BuzzFeed found a Record staff member who recalled helping with the prank, and was “99% certain the way Carson remembers it is correct,” including the difficulty of the makeup questions and how, “at the end, what few students remained - it may have just been one or two, I wasn’t there - received a small cash prize.” Some of the commentary that followed suggested that the story still reflected poorly on Carson, because he couldn’t tell the difference between the Record and the Daily News, and because he fell for the stunt, as, presumably, no sophisticated Eli should. It’s hardly material, and he was writing decades after the fact. The title of the class was Psychology 10, a mistake that Carson blamed on his ghostwriter-not the most gracious move but fair enough. It involved a parody edition of the News. There may not have been a captioned photo in the Daily News, but there was an article that described just such a prank having been pulled off by the Yale Record, a humor publication, in January, 1970. But there was, in fact, a problem with the exposé itself, which became clear in the next few days: Carson’s story held up a lot better than the Journal had implied. ![]() Reporters at the Journal couldn’t find a photo of him in the Yale Daily News they couldn’t find a course with the name Perceptions 310. Last week, the Wall Street Journal cited this episode as a problem with Carson’s biography, one that went to his credibility and-because he is largely running on his inspirational life story-to the heart of his campaign. Then, Carson remembered, they handed him a ten-dollar bill. (He heard some students saying that they’d claim they never saw the notice about the makeup.) Then, when Carson was alone, an instructor and a photographer for the Yale Daily News, who snapped his picture, told him that he’d been tricked-but he had also demonstrated that he was the most honest student in the class. When the makeup proved to be impossibly-almost comically-hard, every student but Carson walked out. “ ‘A hoax,’ the teacher said.” This was the climax of a scene at Yale, where he enrolled as an undergraduate in 1969, in which Carson described having seen a notice that the exam papers for Perceptions 310, a psychology class he was taking, had been accidentally burned, and that there would be a makeup. “‘What’s going on?’ I asked,” Ben Carson wrote in “Gifted Hands,” a memoir he published in 1990. Two exposés targeting Ben Carson have fallen flat for what are, at root, similar reasons.
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