Without ever running for any office, neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson has become a conservative superstar with his warm, off-the-cuff speeches that give conservative principles a honeyed glow. He didn’t always possess such mellow gravitas.
Growing up in a broken home in Detroit, he says, “I used to go after people with baseball bats and chains and everything else. When I was 14 I tried to stab someone.”
Lucky for both young Ben and his victim, the knife broke on a large metal belt buckle. “I realized I tried to kill somebody over nothing,” Carson says on a break from a tour to promote his inspiring book, “One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future.” It’s in its third week at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. (Yet the Times, like the LA Times, The Washington Post and Time magazine, has completely ignored it. The book that sits just behind it on the list, left-wing economist Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has generated at least 20 Times pieces.)
After the stabbing incident, Carson recalls, it was time to choose what kind of man he was going to be.
“I realized there was no chance of becoming a doctor with a temper like that. So I locked myself in the bathroom and I prayed with the Bible.
“I came to an understanding that to lash out at people, rather than being a sign of strength, was a sign of weakness. I also recognized that selfishness had a lot to do with everything. After three hours I walked out of the bathroom and my temper was gone.”
Carson went on to Yale on his way to becoming chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. In 1987, he pulled off the medical miracle of the decade when he separated twins born conjoined at the head.
Meanwhile, he found mollification worked far better than anger as a coping strategy. As a surgeon, he was often mistaken for an orderly by nurses. “After many years of hard work to achieve the title of doctor, many might say that I would have been justified in reacting angrily,” he writes in “One Nation.” Instead, he said, he tried to look at things from the nurse’s point of view. “The only black males she had seen come onto the floor were orderlies . . . Why would she think differently in my case?”
Nurses would be mortified when they learned of their mistake. Carson’s policy? To be extra nice to them. Then: “I would have another friend for life.”
Last year Carson made millions of friends for life when his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast went viral. Speaking extemporaneously and with an ensorcelling simplicity, he sketched out a vision for the country’s future heavy on education, personal and fiscal responsibility and national pride.
In that speech, and in “One Nation,” Carson makes a special target of political correctness, which he identifies as a destructive force, traceable to “Rules for Radicals” author Saul Alinsky, that shuts down conversation, inhibits frankness and generally drives people further apart.
“If we are to survive as a united nation,” Carson writes, “we must learn how to engage in civil discussions of our differences without becoming bitter enemies . . . Let’s talk about the tough issues without scrutinizing every word and castigating anyone who dares to violate the PC rules.”
Now mobs greet him at his book signings. A super PAC dedicated to drafting him to run raked in more money last quarter than did the similar Ready for Hillary group.
Carson has been coy about a political run and inched away from that in a chat on Thursday. “I continue to prefer not to do that,” he said. “I’ve had a long and arduous career and I was kind a looking forward to retirement to be honest. Also I’ve noticed that everyone who goes into that office comes out looking about 20 years older.”
Carson, 62, says he hopes another candidate with respect for the Constitution and our shared values steps forward.
And “if the American people have decided that they no longer subscribe to the original vision of America and want to subscribe to the government’s cradle-to-grave program, then who am I to say they’re wrong?” he says. “A lot will be decided in November.”
Just to be safe, though, left-wingers have begun dumping on Carson. Times columnist Charles Blow is one of many who insisted that the National Prayer Breakfast speech amounted to “blasting” President Obama, who was sitting nearby.
As you can read in “One Nation,” which opens with a transcript of that speech, Carson didn’t mention, or even allude to, the president, except in his opening round of thank-you’s.
Asked about Obama now, Carson says, “I would rate him as doing a tremendous job when it comes to fundamentally changing this country. If that’s what you want, he’s doing great.”
Carson does create controversy, though. I asked him whether it was a poor choice of words to call ObamaCare the “worst thing that has happened in this country since slavery.”
“It was an excellent choice of words,” he says. “It’s because the most important thing a person has is their health and their health care and who you subject control of that to anyone but yourself, especially government bureaucrats, you have fundamentally changed the power structure of America.”
His book tour winding down, Carson is looking forward to going home to learn to play the organ. But he closes by giving conservative acolytes some fresh hope that he might run.
“It’s very gratifying to see that people are waking up by responding,” he says. “I think there’s a real chance that we can get America moving in the same direction again. Stop all of this crap.”