Could Running For President Destroy Ben Carson’s Legacy?
Could Running For President Destroy Ben Carson’s Legacy?
Long before Ben Carson was a champion to social conservatives and an anathema to liberals, he was a legendary neurosurgeon and an icon of black triumph. Will his turn to politics destroy his legacy?
Dr. Ben Carson (right) while director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, in 1987. Fred Kraft / AP Photo
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But he’s now risking this previously unassailable legacy in national politics, where reputations are broken as often as made. He’s making a series of sharp-edged statements that undermine his previously universal appeal, particularly in communities he once sought to set an example for. He has traded one kind of national stature for another one, hotter but also faster burning.
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Carson has already seen elements of his legend fall away. In one of the most painful, in March 2013, he was forced to withdraw as the commencement speaker at Hopkins after comparing same-sex marriage to bestiality and pedophilia, setting off a round of protests at a place where he’d worked, with much distinction, over five decades. This was a new turn for those who have long known Carson as famously soft-spoken at the hospital and fiercely protective of his privacy and time with family away from it. His former colleagues — to a person — bemoan his loss to the field of neurosurgery.
“He has never pushed anybody, never told anybody else what to do,” said Dr. Henry Brem, director of Hopkins’ neurosurgery department and a friend of Carson’s who joined the hospital’s staff with him on the same day in 1984. “And then there he is telling people how to fix the country. I realized, when he’s out there giving these public speeches, it’s a very different side of his personality.”
“The tack he took in recent years was a surprise to everybody,” said Elaine Freeman, a former longtime spokesperson for Hopkins, noting that Carson and her late husband often debated political issues away from the hospital. “The tenor changed.” But tracing the trail of sound bites and dispatches given by Carson, the doctor nicknamed “Gentle Ben,” over the past quarter-century suggests Carson’s political turn is less a shift than a revelation. His values, his views, his way of looking at the world — they haven’t changed much.
“We had to read his books, and listen[ed] to his speeches and other public utterances,” said Vernon Robinson, campaign director of the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee. “It’s a pain in the behind to do that but that’s what you’ve got to do. It’s all there.”
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/joelanderson/ben-carson-politics-legacy#.sevxNmP3wK
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