By Count Friedrich von Olsen
It seems like half the country has jumped on the bandwagon to discredit Ben Carson, most recently over his statement that he had been offered a scholarship to West Point. This is because he has some real rivals – Democrats who understand that he is perhaps the strongest Republican hope to defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential race next year as well as some of his fellow Republicans likewise vying for the Republican nomination, who correctly surmise that he is a formidable opponent they must overcome if their ambition for the GOP nod is to be fulfilled…
Those attacking Ben’s claim have latched onto three elements of his story to make the case that he has prevaricated. These are: 1) That the Army or the Pentagon has no record of his being offered entrance to West Point; 2) That he never applied; 3) That the date of his encounter with then Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland, who made the offer, does not square with the general’s known whereabouts on the day in question…
All of those factoids have substance. The thing is, they don’t prove the case against Mr. Carson…
The Pentagon has no record of Ben being offered the scholarship to West Point. Fair enough. Ben never applied to go to West Point and he received no formal nomination, either from then-President Richard Nixon or his Congressman. Again, that is true. But wait. Ben’s story is that he was in attendance at a Memorial Day Parade in Detroit in the Spring of 1969, when, as the second highest ranking member of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, he was invited to dinner with General Westmoreland, who was in Detroit to confer an award on a soldier from Detroit who was being recognized for his service during the Vietnam War. Ben Carson had risen to the rank of colonel in the JROTC, despite having joined the JROTC late. Once in, he had accelerated past all but one of the other students in Detroit – which is a pretty big place – to achieve colonel status. This impressed the general, who, according to Ben, offered him a full ride through West Point on the spot. According to Ben, he turned down the offer because he knew that upon graduating from West Point he would then have to serve a full four years in the Army and that at that point he was committed to becoming a doctor and wanted to initiate his medical school training immediately upon graduating four-year college…
The naysayers claim that General Westmoreland did not have the authority to make an appointment to West Point, and that such an appointment/nomination had to come from a Congressman or the President. And, Ben’s detractors maintain, the process of applying to West Point begins in a hopeful’s junior year of high school, not in his senior year. What is more, it turns out that General Westmoreland was not in Detroit on Memorial Day 1969 and records kept by the Pentagon as well as newspaper accounts, place him in the nation’s capitol on that day…
Thus, the elaborate and exacting refutation of Ben’s account appears to have some substance. But hold on, because there is a very plausible explanation of how it is that these building blocks of the refutation are right and Ben’s version of events is still true…
It turns out that General Westmoreland in fact was in Detroit in the early part of 1969 and that, just as Ben recalled, he was there to decorate a Vietnam War veteran from the Motor City and that afterword he did hold court with the luminaries of the local JROTC. That event occurred not in May 1969 but in February 1969. It appears that several decades on, as is often the case with human memory, Ben lost his precise temporal bearing, and misremembered the exact date. As old and forgetful as I am, I can forgive him for that and even if I didn’t or others don’t, calling someone a liar because twenty or thirty or forty years later that person is not quite straight on what the timeline was strikes me as a bigger lie…
Now let us turn to Ben’s claim that he was offered the scholarship to West Point by General Westmoreland, which is in dispute because Ben had never applied for admission there and, in any event, General Westmoreland could not officially extend him such a scholarship. To this first point, Ben never asserted that he applied to West Point. As a matter of fact, he has said that the only college he applied to was Yale, which incidentally, accepted him. Now, consider that. Ben applied nowhere other than Yale. That is a pretty lofty school. My sense of it is that it is one of the best colleges in America and one of the best colleges in the world. My research tells me that only two other colleges – Harvard and William and Mary – graduated more U.S. Presidents. I mean no insult to West Point, but it had one fewer of its graduates – two ( Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses Grant) – accede to the presidency than did Yale’s three (William Howard Taft, George Bush and George W. Bush). The point here is that Ben was a very good student, one so good that he did not need to apply to anyplace other than Yale. If he had applied just about anywhere else, he would have been accepted. Given that, and given his accomplishments in Detroit’s JROTC, is it not apparent that when General Westmoreland encountered this 18-year-old he was impressed, indeed so impressed that he offered to get him into West Point? And yes, it is of course true that General Westmoreland, on his own, could not nominate anyone to become a plebe at West Point but, let us be realistic here. They had telephones in those days. If the Army Chief of Staff had merely picked up one of those communication devices and called – I don’t know – someone in the White House (maybe even the President himself) or any of the dozens or scores of Congressmen he knew and said, “Hey, there’s this kid from Detroit and from what I can tell he would make a great Army officer. I know it’s a little late in the process but do you think you could nominate him to the Academy?” doesn’t it stand to reason that someone – probably the first one the Army Chief of Staff called – would have said, “Yes”? The point here is Ben didn’t need to apply. His story is that the scholarship was offered to him spontaneously. I find that to be credible. In fact, I would be more inclined to call Ben a liar if his story was that General Westmoreland didn’t make the offer. And, of course, the Pentagon and the Army have no record of his applying or being accepted because he never applied…
My advice to those who are so set on keeping Ben out of the White House is this: Go waste your time finding something else because this West Point thing is a non-starter…