Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson at a Barnes and Noble on November 5 in Miami.
Advertisement
The outlet that claimed Ben Carson had admitted to fabricating a story about a scholarship has now changed its tune, following pushback from Carson’s camp and other outlets. “The story online includes additional details now as well that bolster this account”.
Carson “never said he was admitted or even applied” to West Point, according to Carson campaign spokesman Doug Watts.
Questions about Carson’s assertions about his personal history, including his claim that he was a troubled youth beset at times by violent behavior, and his inaccurate pronouncements about historical events have gained attention as he has risen to the top of a few national polls. There has been a few doubt cast as to the specifics of that meeting, particularly whether Westmoreland was even in Detroit on Memorial day in 1969.
One said he had a vague memory of the story of the attempted stabbing, but thought that it was just a “story”. But West Point told CNN on Friday that it does not keep records of decades-old applications, and would not be able to know if Carson was offered an appointment because he did not attend.
“With Ben Carson wanting to hit his mother on head with a hammer, stab a friend and Pyramids built for grain storage – don’t people get it?”
Carson wrote that he and his classmates had been told their final exam papers for the course had “inadvertently burned” and that they would need to take the test again.
The question now is whether Carson’s past will prove too much of a stain in his hopes for a presidential future. Evangelical voters have helped push Carson into the lead for the Republican presidential nomination.
“The academy has occupied a central place in Carson’s tale for years”. Conservative press has backed Carson, arguing that the media have been trying to purposefully end Carson’s campaign.
For now, it seems, he’ll just have to answer whether he was Yale’s most honest student. It appears that the controversies have also begun to have an interesting effect on Carson himself. The Carson campaign has denied any of the stories in the autobiography were falsified.
The GOP frontrunner pointed to the passage of time to explain why he couldn’t recall who had offered him the scholarship. According to Willaims, Carson was encouraged to apply to the military academy, where students do not pay tuition, but he did not pursue it. “He never followed through, he never applied, because he knew that medicine was his calling”, Williams said on CNN on Friday afternoon. Sen.
Advertisement
“It may have happened, but I didn’t see it myself or hear about it”, Gregory Vartanian, a white high school classmate of Carson’s who was on ROTC with him and is now a retired U.S. Marshal, told the Journal.
