![]() Carson presents a series of vignettes related to his high-school career, during which he was active in R.O.T.C., and to his college-admissions decisions. “Gifted Hands” can be a confusing book, because the narrative jumps back and forth in the timeline. This line of attack, with its undertones of élitism, is not likely to do him any damage with his supporters.Īnother exposé, by Politico, about whether Carson was offered admission to West Point-he never seems to have formally applied-fell flat for what are, at root, similar reasons. BuzzFeed found a Record staff member who recalled helping with the prank, and was “99% certain the way Carson remembers it is correct,” including the difficulty of the makeup questions and how, “at the end, what few students remained - it may have just been one or two, I wasn’t there - received a small cash prize.” Some of the commentary that followed suggested that the story still reflected poorly on Carson, because he couldn’t tell the difference between the Record and the Daily News, and because he fell for the stunt, as, presumably, no sophisticated Eli should. It’s hardly material, and he was writing decades after the fact. The title of the class was Psychology 10, a mistake that Carson blamed on his ghostwriter-not the most gracious move but fair enough. It involved a parody edition of the News. There may not have been a captioned photo in the Daily News, but there was an article that described just such a prank having been pulled off by the Yale Record, a humor publication, in January, 1970. But there was, in fact, a problem with the exposé itself, which became clear in the next few days: Carson’s story held up a lot better than the Journal had implied. Reporters at the Journal couldn’t find a photo of him in the Yale Daily News they couldn’t find a course with the name Perceptions 310. ![]() Last week, the Wall Street Journal cited this episode as a problem with Carson’s biography, one that went to his credibility and-because he is largely running on his inspirational life story-to the heart of his campaign. Then, Carson remembered, they handed him a ten-dollar bill. (He heard some students saying that they’d claim they never saw the notice about the makeup.) Then, when Carson was alone, an instructor and a photographer for the Yale Daily News, who snapped his picture, told him that he’d been tricked-but he had also demonstrated that he was the most honest student in the class. When the makeup proved to be impossibly-almost comically-hard, every student but Carson walked out. “ ‘A hoax,’ the teacher said.” This was the climax of a scene at Yale, where he enrolled as an undergraduate in 1969, in which Carson described having seen a notice that the exam papers for Perceptions 310, a psychology class he was taking, had been accidentally burned, and that there would be a makeup. “‘What’s going on?’ I asked,” Ben Carson wrote in “Gifted Hands,” a memoir he published in 1990. Two exposés targeting Ben Carson have fallen flat for what are, at root, similar reasons.
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