Ben Carson: Bungling Surgeon

Detroit in spring 1969 was not exactly a place brimming with pride in the military adventures of the nation.

I put the likelihood that there was any kind of military parade -- at all -- in Detroit in May 1969 involving students from Southwestern High School at about 22 percent.

The spectacle of old white men from Washington in medal-bedecked uniforms sitting on a review stand and waving their fingers at young black men being sized up for shipment to Vietnam would just not have gone over very well at all with the citizenry. Not well at all.

 

Well, while understanding that admission to West Point is not some informal thing, I do think it is totally plausible, that in 1969, the Chief of Staff would encourage an African-American, ROTC member, with the grades/scores to get into Yale, to consider attending West Point, and to give that student a strong indication that he would be accepted if he applied. And, since no one pays tuition to attend West Point, I think it's very plausible that he would have used the word "scholarship" during this discussion.

In 2015, West Point maintains a Diversity Outreach

Office: Admissions - Diversity_Outreach

In 2015, West Point is still 50% short of it's goal for African-American cadets:

West Point doesn't have quotas, but it does have diversity goals for gender, race and other demographic categories, designed to match the ideal breakdown of the future officer corps. The school wants at least 20 percent of its cadets to be female, for example, a figure that rose last year from a targeted range of between 14 percent and 20 percent.

One area where the Army seeks improvement, Caslen said, is in the number of black officers, which stands at 13.2 percent — about even with the 13.1 percent African-American population in the U.S., but "woefully behind" the 22.5 percent of enlisted troops who are black.

"The Army recognizes that, and the Army would like, ideally, to get to that 22.5 percent [among officers], as well," the superintendent said.

West Point adds female cadets as gender barriers fall

I'm not sure how formal the process of recruiting minorities was in 1969, but I would expect that the Army Chief of Staff, among others, would want to encourage someone of Carson's talents to apply.

And, unless you applied and/or attended a service academy in the late '60's or early '70's, I'm not sure how knowledge of the current process would be relevant.

 

Here's how a 2009 biography David Petraeus describes the "recruitment process":

Several of his teachers at Cornwall High School were retired West Point instructors and now formed an informal recruiting network, steering local teenagers with the stuff to handle the rigors of cadet life to West Point. They urged Petraeus, a star on the school’s championship soccer team and a top-notch student, to seek an appointment.
...
A wiry 150 pounds, Petraeus barely looked old enough to be out of junior high school. His family had no ties to the Army. His father, Sixtus Petraeus, a Dutch seaman until World War II, when he emigrated to the United States, worked for the local power company. His mother, who had attended Oberlin College, was uncertain about sending her only son into the Army with the Vietnam War still under way. But when West Point became one of the few colleges to recruit him to play soccer, Petraeus decided to give it a try. The full scholarship was attractive to a family of limited means, and if he didn’t like it, he could always transfer before his junior year without owing the Army anything.

The Making of General Petraeus

Petraeus and Carson are about the same age.

So, it's totally believable that an informal recruiting network would reach out to a guy like him, and encourage him to attend, with the prospect of a "full scholarship" being one of the top draws, but it's inconceivable, that the Army Chief of Staff would have done the same with Ben Carson?

 

Let's not lose sight of the worst part of this story, the fact that probably dozens of outlets reported that Carson "admitted" that he "fabricated" the offer story. He did no such thing, but that's now what hundreds of thousands of Americans think. This may end his campaign, due to inaccurate reporting - and re-reporting - that was a more egregious bending of the relevant facts than Cardon engaged in.

 

The admissions process was the same in the 1960s when my old man went through it as it was in the 1990s when I looked at going through it as it is today. Nothing about it has fundamentally changed.

I don't think anyone is disputing that Gen. Westmoreland spoke with Carson about the possibility of attending West Point. What's off, apparently, is that it didn't happen when Carson said it did - understandable so many years later - and the idea that Gen. Westmoreland would have offered him a full scholarship, which is something he couldn't do since he didn't control admissions and you can argue the semantics about whether it really exists to begin with.

 

Carson pointed out that "full scholarship" is used in West Point's online and print recruiting materials.

 

Again, this isn't 2015 Long Island, where every mother has the CV of every Ivy admissions director committed to memory. Why would Carson believe that Westmoreland's has less clout than done muckety-muck reviewing applications in an office.

 

Fact-checking Ben Carson's defense of his West Point scholarship story

 

I wonder how many parents of West Point-bound cadets use the word "full scholarship"? I'd guess at least 75 percent of them.

 

You're trying to set up a false dichotomy comparing a 2015 Long Island mother to a top ROTC student in 1969 being encouraged to attend West Point by an important general.

I find it hard to believe that Carson didn't even look into it the slightest bit in 1969 to learn that everyone with an appointment gets a "full scholarship" contingent on repaying it with eight years of service, or that he would have needed a nomination from a congressman (something Westmoreland could have helped with if he was really that interested in Carson). I also find it hard to believe that at no point in the intervening years did anyone tell him: Hey, the way you're describing this isn't quite right.

Again, I don't think this particular embellishment is a big deal. It's not like he claimed to have come under sniper fire, or something. I also think he knew it was embellished.