Famed pediatric brain surgeon Dr. Ben Carson, who became a conservative leader after giving a National Prayer Breakfast speech that was considered critical of the Obama administration, revealed Tuesday that the he was prodded afterwards to personally apologize to President Obama.

“I got a call from one of the organizers. They said, ‘The White House is very upset and you need to call the president and you need to apologize,’” Dr. Carson said on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends.”

Dr. Carson, who received the call 15 minutes after giving the National Prayer Breakfast keynote speech last year with Mr. Obama sitting two seats away on the dais, said he refused to say he was sorry.

“I said I had talked to the president afterwards. He didn’t seem upset and there’s no reason he should be unless what I said applied to him,” he said.

It was the first time Dr. Carson personally recounted the story, which he detailed in his newly released book “One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future.”

In the prayer breakfast speech, which catapulted Dr. Carson to the forefront of conservative politics and sparked rumors the he was eyeing a run for the White House, he lambasted the direction America is heading and warned about the perils of the “moral decay and fiscal irresponsibility” that face the nation.

“PC is dangerous,” Carson said in the speech. “In this country, one of the founding principles was freedom of thought and freedom of expression. (Political correctness) puts a muzzle on people.

“We have imposed upon people restrictions on what they can say, on what they can think. And the media is the largest proponent of this, crucifying people who say things really quite innocently.”

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