Nor does West Point give out full scholarships, per se.
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“He considered it but in the end did not seek admission”, Bennett said.
The story stemmed from a passage in Carson’s 1992 autobiography, “Gifted Hands”, in which he recalled a 1969 meeting with the late, Vietnam-era General William Westmoreland.
Carson called the CNN story a “smear campaign” and said questions about his past are a “bunch of lies”. The Carson campaign has shrugged off the reporting as a “bunch of lies”. Carson wrote that the professor told students their final exams had been “burned”, and they would have to finish a new, more hard test. Carson said he was the only student to complete the new exam, which was actually a test to determine the “most honest” student in the class. He purportedly was given a $10 bill for finishing the exam, and his photo was taken for Yale’s student newspaper.
Questions about Carson’s account of the West Point scholarship came to the fore after a report by political news website Politico on differing accounts of the scholarship.
While an official letter of admission would have come from the adjutant general of the Army, who was not Westmoreland, she said it was common for top military officials to recruit the best and brightest high school students.
The Republican presidential candidate told the story of an elaborate hoax in his 1990 autobiography, “Gifted Hands”.
“I would hit people with hammers”, Carson once said.
In fact, there is no evidence in Politico’s story that Carson ever claimed to have applied to West Point. “I’m not going to say it is a mistake, so forget about it”. Hours later, Politico broke the story of Carson’s embellishment on West Point.
“I don’t like to generally bring them in, the names I used for instance are fictitious names because I don’t want to bring people into something like this because I know what you guys do to their lives”, Carson told reporters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
David Brody: Right, so just so I understand, the beef that the campaign, yourself have with Politico is that they started to go down this normal path of applying an admission process, and you’re saying is that they got that wrong because that’s not the way it went down. I understand the way West Point works is through a different mechanism, but that’s the way it was presented to me, and you know I’m thinking of something that happened nearly a half century ago.
“WOW, one of many lies by Ben Carson!”.
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It interviewed nine of Carson’s childhood neighbors and friends, who had no recollection of the angry man Carson often describes himself as on the campaign trail.
