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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBen Carson’s Past Faces Deeper Questions
The day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, Ben Carsons black classmates unleashed their anger and grief on white students who were a minority at Detroits Southwestern High. Mr. Carson, then a junior with a key to a biology lab where he worked part time, told The Wall Street Journal last month that he protected a few white students from the attacks by hiding them there.
It is a dramatic account of courage and kindness, and it couldnt be confirmed in interviews with a half-dozen of Mr. Carsons classmates and his high school physics teacher. The students all remembered the riot. None recalled hearing about white students hiding in the biology lab, and Mr. Carson couldnt remember any names of those he sheltered.
(snip)
Mr. Carsons biography, a rise from poverty to become a top neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University, is central to his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Now, his storytold in nine books and countless inspirational speeches over the past 25 yearshas come under the harsh scrutiny of presidential politics, where rivals and media hunt for embellishments and omissions that can hobble a campaign.
(snip)
In his 1990 autobiography, Gifted Hands, Mr. Carson writes of a Yale psychology professor who told Mr. Carson, then a junior, and the other students in the classidentified by Mr. Carson as Perceptions 301that their final exam papers had inadvertently burned, requiring all 150 students to retake it. The new exam, Mr. Carson recalled in the book, was much tougher. All the students but Mr. Carson walked out.
The professor came toward me. With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture, Mr. Carson wrote. A hoax, the teacher said. We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class. Mr. Carson wrote that the professor handed him a $10 bill.
No photo identifying Mr. Carson as a student ever ran, according to the Yale Daily News archives, and no stories from that era mention a class called Perceptions 301. Yale Librarian Claryn Spies said Friday there was no psychology course by that name or class number during any of Mr. Carsons years at Yale.
In books and speeches, Mr. Carson has said he hated living in poverty, vowed to grow rich, and lashed out in anger at others until a religious transformation at age 14. When CNN sent reporters to his former neighborhood in Detroit to verify Mr. Carsons stories of violence, including attempting to stab a boy in the stomach, none who knew Mr. Carson as a youth recalled any such trouble. Instead, most of Mr. Carsons former friends and neighbors remember him much as he is today: soft-spoken and studious.
(snip)
Last month, Mr. Carson said in a radio interview that, as a young doctor, he had a gun stuck in his ribs at a Popeyes restaurant in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins University. A guy comes in and puts a gun in my ribs. And I just said, I believe that you want the guy behind the counter, Mr. Carson said. He said, Oh, okay. The Baltimore Police Department later said it couldnt find a report matching the incident Mr. Carson described.
In response to a question at a recent GOP presidential debate, Mr. Carson said he didnt have an involvement with Mannatech Inc., a multilevel marketing company that sells nutritional supplements, and called any suggestion to the contrary propaganda. Mr. Carson, who has taken the companys products, appeared in videos that could until recently be found on Mannatechs website, including two filmed in 2013 and styled like commercials.
Mr. Carson also has given four paid speeches at Mannatech gatherings; the proceeds from three went to a Carson-affiliated charity. Mannatech settled false-advertising charges with Texas in 2009.
One reason that Mr. Carsons stories are difficult to check is that he navigated the turbulent times of his young adulthood without leaving much of a trace. He arrived as a scholarship student at Yale University in 1969 to a campus engulfed in protests but said he avoided them.
(snip)
Mr. Carson was assigned to Davenport College, a four-story brick dormitory with a gothic facade where future Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke invited anti-war speakers. Yet, when other students discussed politics and their changing world over meals in the cafeteria, Mr. Carson rarely spoke up, according to interviews with more than 50 Davenport College dorm residents of that era.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ben-carsons-past-faces-deeper-questions-1446861864
pnwmom
(108,990 posts)Because I've been afraid he'd be the next Ronald Reagan.
question everything
(47,517 posts)but decided to skip it since everyone knows it by now.
DesertFlower
(11,649 posts)for president or trying to convert people?
Bucky
(54,041 posts)crazy ass knucklehead
napi21
(45,806 posts)the degree of scrutiny each must go through during their campaigns. Very little escapes the media & their opponents, and if you lie about anything or exaggerate an event in your past, SOMEONE WILL FIND IT! THEN, they forget almost everything they say or do is on video tape somewhere. Those things destroy most campaigns, especially the newbies tp the national stage.
XemaSab
(60,212 posts)I'd never run for president because I wouldn't want every single post I ever made on the DU to be a matter of public scrutiny. I wouldn't want every Facebook post to be a matter of public scrutiny. I wouldn't want everything I ever wrote for the high school newspaper to be a matter of public scrutiny.
Unless you're really confident nobody's ever going to discover the time you called for the entire George Bush regime to be sent to the Hague, just don't run for office.
(P.S. The entire Bush regime should totally be sent to the Hague.)
WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Democrats are constantly lying to smear all their candidates, thus never expected that actual research might be undertaken.
I have neighbors who never consider, cannot be persuaded to look up and check, whether something they don't like to hear is true. They "know" it is not and they "know" where the lies came from and why. (We just can't stop maliciously lying about everything.)
question everything
(47,517 posts)that all this shows that he struggled and was saved by god. This should make him win in Iowa..
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)they can trust to serve God. Dominionism has infiltrated virtually all evangelical churches and is a real concern.
napi21
(45,806 posts)I know they're loud and always appear to be a group much bigger than they really are, there aren't multi-millions of them as they'd like us to believe. Hope they STAY that was forever!
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)group of Christians in America at 25% or more depending on how the data are gathered, and they vote in large numbers. They are a major political force.
napi21
(45,806 posts)they ARE a minority and I HOPE they stay that way! It appears that the younger generations aren't nearly as radical as those who are protesting so loudly, and I hope they are slowly dying off of old age. There's a similar situation with many other hate groups, blacks, gays, immigrants, etc. The youth of America don't understand why that hate exists and they don't support it.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)aren't actually declining in numbers yet, like other religious groups, but given population growth just holding isn't impressive. Hate, and the dominionism that's infiltrated most Christian sects, not to mention end times theology -- I'd think you'd have to be a pretty strong believer to sustain the idea of murdering billions and turning the planet to ash before you've even had a chance to see it.
treestar
(82,383 posts)nothing was known of Obama in his college years, etc.? Implying there was some conspiracy? And now I bet they have no problem with this.
ryan_cats
(2,061 posts)Thanks to Carson's quick thinking, Anne Frank lived to write her diary.
suffragette
(12,232 posts)Being the only student to stay to take an exam after the exams have have supposedly been destroyed has nothing to do with honesty. If there had been cheating involved, then honesty would be a factor, but honesty has nothing to do with the issue as he presented it.
Taking a stand with the other students would have been a stand about being fair to all, but that's clearly not a point he chooses to try to make.
That's some skewed perception going on there.
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)Carson probably would have gotten away with just saying that he was considering going to West Point, but decided on medical school instead. What we get, though, is a personal lunch with Gen. Westmoreland, fresh back from Vietnam, who is so impressed with young Ben Carson, he offers Ben Carson a scholarship on the spot.
Carson could have said his high school erupted in violence after Dr. King's assassination, but he wasn't one of those young hotheads (in contrast to his stories about his hotheaded ways), and instead tried to talk other kids out of beating up white students. Instead, Ben Carson has a key to a campus lab, and Ben Carson heroically shelters white kids from getting beaten up.
There's never an ordinary incident in Ben Carson's life. Everything is larger than life, marking Ben Carson as the kind of fellow who's always going to stand out from the crowd, courageously leading the way or making an impression that later nobody can seem to remember. Everyone's a star in their own movie, but Ben Carson is the star, director, producer, and publicist.
suffragette
(12,232 posts)In all his stories.
SoCalDem
(103,856 posts)Walter Mitty & Forrest Gump