Report: Ben Carson Made Up Story About Scholarship, West Point

By MARC TORRENCE (Patch National Staff)

Ben Carson’s campaign admitted that the GOP presidential candidate fabricated a story about being admitted to West Point on a full scholarship, according to a Politico report.

In his book “Gifted Hands,” the former Johns Hopkins surgeon describes dining with Gen. William Westmoreland in 1969, who had just gotten back from Vietnam.

Following their dinner, the book claims, Carson was offered a full scholarship to West Point.

The academy has no record of a scholarship offer or even an application, Politico reported. Instead, the campaign said Carson briefly spoke with Westmoreland at a banquet.

• See Also: Ben Carson’s Lie — And 7 Other Candidate Blunders

“He was introduced to folks from West Point by his ROTC Supervisors,” Carson’s campaign manager Barry Bennett told Politico. “They told him they could help him get an appointment based on his grades and performance in ROTC. He considered it but in the end did not seek admission.”

Carson’s campaign has denied that he “admitted” to anything in a statement to The Daily Caller.

“The campaign never ‘admitted to anything,’” Doug Watts, a campaign spokesman, wrote in an email. “The Politico story is an outright Lie.”

Carson’s claim was not just a one-off anecdote in a six-year-old book, either.

The story has a central part of a stump speech in which he describes pulling himself up from his bootstraps to make something of himself.

The admission calls into question other claims Carson has made on the campaign trail that have been scrutinized.

One of those involves him attempting to stab a friend. Carson now says it was a “close relative” and not a friend.

In another claim, which he made following the shooting at an Oregon college, Carson says he looked down the barrel of a loaded gun at a Popeye’s Chicken that was being robbed, but told the gunman that he didn’t work at the restaurant.

A recent Fox News poll, released before his admission, showed Carson polling at 23 percent nationally, just three points behind front-runner Donald Trump and 12 points higher than both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

• Read the full Politico story about Carson’s claim here.

Related

• Carson’s Michigan Surge Mirrors National Polls

» Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr