Ben Carson campaign admits candidate did not seek admission to West Point

Doubts about the veracity of stories Republican presidential frontrunner Ben Carson has told about his life multiplied on Friday when his campaign admitted he had never sought admission to the prestigious West Point military academy.

The Carson campaign was confronted with records from West Point showing that he had never sought admission nor been admitted to the academy, reported Politico.

“Dr Carson did not seek admission,” his campaign manager admitted in response.

A West Point admissions officer told Politico the academy had no records of a Carson application. “If he chose to pursue [the application process] then we would have records indicating such,” the officer was quoted as saying.

This seems to contradict an account Carson published in his bestselling 1990 memoir Gifted Hands and elsewhere about being offered a scholarship to the academy after an outstanding performance in a reserve officers training corps (ROTC) program in his Detroit high school.

“At the end of my twelfth grade I marched at the head of the [1969] Memorial Day parade,” Carson writes in Gifted Hands. “I felt so proud, my chest bursting with ribbons and braids of every kind. To make it more wonderful, we had important visitors that day. Two soldiers who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Viet Nam [sic] were present.

“More exciting to me, General William Westmoreland (very prominent in the Viet Nam war) attended with an impressive entourage. Afterward, Sgt Hunt [Carson’s ROTC adviser] introduced me to General Westmoreland, and I had dinner with him and the Congressional Medal winners. Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”

On Facebook in August, Carson repeated the claim: “The next question is from Bill. He wanted to know if it was true that I was offered a slot at West Point after high school.

“Bill, that is true. I was the highest student ROTC member in Detroit and was thrilled to get an offer from West Point. But I knew medicine is what I wanted to do. So I applied to only one school. (it was all the money I had). I applied to Yale and thank God they accepted me. I often wonder what might have happened had they said no.”

In addition to the line about the admission and scholarship, the circumstances of Carson’s reported meeting with Westmoreland were also cast into doubt by Politico.

Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, wrote in a statement obtained by the Guardian:

Dr Carson was the top ROTC student in the City of Detroit. In that role he was invited to meet General Westmoreland. He believes it was at a banquet. He can’t remember with specificity their brief conversation but it centered around Dr. Carson’s performance as ROTC City Executive Officer.

He was introduced to folks from West Point by his ROTC Supervisors. 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. There are “Service Connected” nominations for stellar High School ROTC appointments. Again he was the top ROTC student in Detroit. I would argue strongly that an Appointment is indeed an amazing full scholarship. Having run several Congressional Offices I am very familiar with the Nomination process.

Again, though his Senior Commander was in touch with West Point and told Dr. Carson he could get in, Dr Carson did not seek admission.

Carson told a press conference on Friday night: “It was an offer to me ... I interpreted it as an offer ... I don’t remember the names of the people; it’s almost 50 years ago.

“I bet you don’t remember the names of all the people you talked to 50 years ago. They told me it was available to me because of my accomplishments.”

The process of applying for West Point is a rigorous one that has not changed much since Carson’s high school days.

It is also one about which members of an ROTC program would have been informed in detail, since Junior ROTC members are and were eligible to participate in a unique nomination process with West Point involving their commanding officer

Candidates not from military families or in ROTC must compete for nominations to the academy from their state’s US senators, their congressional district’s representative, the vice president, or the secretary of the US army. (Students from other US territories can seek nominations through their federal representatives.)

Most offices begin accepting applications before the end of a student’s junior year in high school, and stop taking applications before Thanksgiving. Students must then complete a fairly typical college application process, be interviewed by school representatives and complete medical and fitness assessments.

All offers of admission are made well before Memorial Day – the last Monday in May – in a given year, since Reception Day, which marks the beginning of more than six weeks of cadet basic training, is historically at the end of June to allow freshmen to start the academic year with their classmates in August.

It is extremely unlikely that any officer of the US army would, on his own, make “an offer” or offer a “full scholarship” to a high school senior around the time of Memorial Day, with less than a month to go before Reception Day, or refer to West Point’s tradition of providing a free higher education to deserving cadets in exchange for a commitment of service as “a scholarship”.

If in fact, as Politico suggests, Carson met Westmoreland in February 1969 rather than around the time of Memorial Day, the rolling admissions process of the 1960s would have allowed him to apply then, and the low number of applications in the middle of the Vietnam war might have made it possible for him to have been accepted late if he applied. But it is extremely unlikely that the general would have verbally guaranteed him admission at that time.

The controversy over the West Point story broke just as Carson took the lead in terms of polling averages in the Republican presidential nominating race, edging ahead of rival Donald Trump, who leapt on the admission on Twitter:

Carson’s personal story, a dramatic tale of growing up in poverty with incidents of violence in Detroit and rising to the pinnacle of professional success as a pioneering neurosurgeon who was awarded the presidential medal of freedom, is one of the central themes of his campaign, which has attracted broad support with its message of self-reliance, faith in God and a need for national unity.

But the fake West Point admission is only one of many details of Carson’s stories about his early years to have come under scrutiny in recent weeks.

The candidate responded with uncharacteristic defensiveness and annoyance in an appearance on CNN Friday morning in which he was asked about details of another incident he described in Gifted Hands and elsewhere that has been called into question.

In that incident, Carson said he tried to stab a friend or acquaintance as a middle-schooler but his knife hit the person’s belt buckle and broke. In Gifted Hands, the scene is a set-up for Carson’s discovery of God, in which he suffers an emotional breakdown, realizing what he had done, retreats to a bathroom and emerges reborn.

Asked about discrepancies in various versions of the account of the attempted stabbing he has given, Carson said for the first time on Thursday that the near-victim was “a close relative”, not a friend or acquaintance, and that that close relative did not want to talk to the media.

Carson then accused the press of “pathetic … lies”.

“I saw your article,” he said on CNN, referring to a piece interviewing the candidate’s former classmates. “I didn’t see any elementary school friends there. It’s a bunch of lies. That’s what it is. A bunch of lies, attempting to say that I’m lying about my history. I think it’s pathetic.

“Obama was not vetted like this,” Carson continued. It “doesn’t even come close to what you guys are trying to do in my case.

“It is just garbage. We have too many things that are important to deal with.”

Correction, 6 November 2015: The original headline and first paragraph of this story misstated the extent of what Ben Carson’s campaign had admitted. This has been corrected