He considered it but in the end did not seek admission." The Politico story initially took this as an admission that Carson had lied.
"They told him they could help him get an appointment based on his grades and performance in ROTC. "He was introduced to folks from West Point by his ROTC Supervisors," campaign manager Barry Bennett told Cheney.
When Cheney confronted the Carson campaign with these facts, they conceded that no scholarship offer had ever been made. "If he chose to pursue (the application process) then we would have records indicating such," she said. She said West Point has no records that indicate Carson even began the application process. "In 1969, those who would have completed the entire process would have received their acceptance letters from the Army Adjutant General," said Theresa Brinkerhoff, a spokeswoman for the academy. Kyle Cheney of Politico called West Point and found that it had no record of Carson applying, let alone being admitted: "Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point," he writes: The section of Gifted Hands where Carson recalls getting the scholarship. William Westmoreland at a Memorial Day parade his senior of high school Carson was active in Junior ROTC as a teenager.
In his 1990 memoir, Gifted Hands (which was subsequently adapted into a TV movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr. Ben Carson, who is currently leading polls for the Republican presidential nomination nationally and in Iowa, appears to have lied for more than two decades about getting a scholarship from the US Military Academy at West Point.