Last May, the Prince and Mudd Library launched the Larry DuPraz Digital Archives, which offers scans of The Daily Princetonian from its early issues in 1876 through 2002. Going through the collection, named after the paper's former production manager and informal adviser, is like stepping back in history. I highly recommend it, when you're feeling a bit of that Princeton nostalgia, or wondering if Wendy Kopp '89 lived in your dorm room. Sit back, click around, and travel back to a time when Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was that senior who was always winning awards and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels was that kid who got arrested after the drug bust in his room in Cuyler.Wait, what?So, the real reason I started looking into the Prince archives was because I stumbled across a Politico blog post about Daniels' curious arrest in 1970. (Unfortunately, the Prince archives aren't available for that year--they're in the process of uploading every year.) Daniels, one of the frontrunners for the GOP presidential nomination, was charged with two counts, marijuana possession and maintaining a nuisance (the nuisance being his room, 111 Cuyler, out of which undercover officers said they purchased marijuana and LSD.)From Politico:
According to campus newspaper reports supplied by the university, Daniels and two other students were swept up in a five-month joint investigation between New Jersey state police and local police that culminated in the May 14th, 1970 raid on Daniels' shared room at 111 Cuyler Hall....
A local detective testified that police had seized "enough marijuana to fill two size 12 shoe boxes and quantities of prescription drugs were found in the room," according to a dispatch in the Daily Princetonian, whose archives aren't available online for that year.The undercover state police officer involved in the sting visited Daniels' room "eight or nine times" and "observed narcotics paraphernalia, saw marijuana and hashish being used, and purchased marijuana prescription drugs and LSD."
In 1988, when he declined to seek Dan Quayle's Indiana Senate seat, the former Wilson School major told the Prince that after his arrest, he believed that "any goal I might have had for competing for public office were shot." He later reconsidered, citing other elected officials with histories of drug use, but concluded that he wasn't "the least bit interested" in working in Washington.
It looks like Daniels, known as a smart, middle-of-the-road conservative (think anti-Palin), may have changed his mind. The Los Angeles Times reports that he has promised to make a decision about whether he will run for president in 2012 by May.To read more about him, check out this profile in Newsweek by Press Club alum Andrew Romano '04 (whose Twitter account tipped me off to Daniels' Princeton adventures--though the main point of the tweet was, look at that tie, and, I know right?)
