Gregor Daniels Popular Books

Gregor Daniels Biography & Facts

Mitchell Elias Daniels Jr. (born April 7, 1949) is an American academic administrator, businessman, author, and retired politician who served as the 49th governor of Indiana from 2005 to 2013. A Republican, he later served as president of Purdue University from 2013 until the end of 2022. Daniels began his career as an assistant to senator Richard Lugar, working as his chief of staff in the Senate from 1977 to 1982. He was appointed executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee when Lugar was chairman from 1983 to 1984. He worked as a chief political advisor and as a liaison to President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He then moved back to Indiana to become president of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. He later joined Eli Lilly and Company where he served as president of North American Pharmaceutical Operations from 1993 to 1997 and as senior vice president of corporate strategy and policy from 1997 to 2001. In January 2001, Daniels was appointed by President George W. Bush as the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, where he served until June 2003. Daniels ran in Indiana's 2004 gubernatorial election after leaving the Bush administration. He won the Republican primary with 67% of the vote and defeated Democratic incumbent Governor Joe Kernan in the general election. In 2008, Daniels was reelected to a second term, defeating Jill Long Thompson. During his tenure, Daniels cut the state government workforce by 18%, cut and capped state property taxes, balanced the state budget through austerity measures and increasing spending by less than the inflation rate. In his second term, Daniels saw protest by labor unions and Democrats in the state legislature over Indiana's school voucher program, privatization of public highways, and the attempt to pass 'right to work' legislation, leading to the 2011 Indiana legislative walkouts. During the legislature's last session under Daniels, he signed a 'right-to-work law', with Indiana becoming the 23rd state in the nation to pass such legislation. It was widely speculated that Daniels would be a candidate in the 2012 presidential election, but he chose not to run. Daniels was selected by the Trustees of the Board of Purdue University, all of whom he appointed or re-appointed while Governor, to become the university president after his term as governor ended on January 14, 2013. He retired as Purdue president on January 1, 2023. Early life Family and education Mitchell Elias Daniels Jr. was born on April 7, 1949, in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, the son of Dorothy Mae (née Wilkes) and Mitchell Elias Daniels. His father's parents were Syrian immigrants from Qalatiyah, Syria, of Antiochian Greek Orthodox descent. Daniels has been honored by the Arab-American Institute with the 2011 Najeeb Halaby Award for Public Service. His mother's ancestry was mostly English (where three of his great-grandparents were born). Daniels spent his early childhood years in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Georgia. The Daniels family moved to Indiana from Pennsylvania in 1959 when his father accepted a job at the Indianapolis headquarters of the pharmaceutical company Pitman-Moore. The 10-year-old Daniels was accustomed to the mountains, and he at first disliked the flatland of central Indiana. He was still in grade school at the time of the move and first attended Delaware Trail Elementary, Westlane Junior High School, and North Central High School. In high school he was student body president. After graduation in 1967, Daniels was named one of Indiana's Presidential Scholars—the state's top male high school graduate that year—by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1971, Daniels earned a Bachelor's degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University after completing a senior thesis titled "The Politics of Metropolitanization: City-County Consolidation in Indianapolis, Indiana". While at Princeton, he was a member of the American Whig–Cliosophic Society, where he overlapped with future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was a year below. He initially studied law at the Indiana McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. After accepting a job with newly elected Senator Richard Lugar, he transferred to the Georgetown University Law Center, from which he earned a Juris Doctor. Drug Arrest In 1970, while an undergraduate at Princeton, Daniels and three roommates were a part of a several months long drug investigation that began on Saturday, March 7, 1970, when one of Daniels's roommates was arrested for possessing "large quantities" of marijuana and other drugs. Two months later police raided the same residence hall, finding enough marijuana to fill two size 12 shoeboxes and arresting five additional individuals, including Daniels. Daniels and a roommate were charged with possession of marijuana, LSD and other drugs, along with "maintaining a common nuisance" for allowing the room to be used for the sale and use of drugs. In a plea agreement, the prosecutor dropped the charges in exchange for Daniels agreeing to pay a fine of $350 for using marijuana. Thirty-four years after the arrest, the first roommate detained (the individual arrested months before Daniels), told the Indianapolis Star that he was a partisan Democrat who "would gladly offer unflattering information about a Republican—if he had any" but Daniels had "nothing to do" with selling drugs. Another roommate said that police obtained a warrant to search the room based on the activity of the first roommate arrested. "Unbeknownst to [Daniels and the other current roommates] ... [he] was coming back there and using the room when we're not there and was involved with drugs much worse than pot...We considered ourselves innocent victims." Daniels refutes the idea that he was innocent saying he "had used marijuana" and "was fined for that, and that was appropriate". Daniels has disclosed the arrest on job applications and in government background checks and spoken about the incident in opinion columns. In a 1989 opinion piece in The Washington Post, Daniels called the incident the "unfortunate confluence of my wild oats period and America's libertine apogee" and said "On my college campus, just as on most college campuses, marijuana was as easy to obtain as Budweiser beer and was viewed with equal complacency. For a time, I was a carefree consumer of both." Daniels claimed his "young Midwestern tail was jerked back into line" following the arrest. Early political career Daniels had his first experience in politics while still a teenager when, in 1968, he worked on the unsuccessful campaign of fellow Hoosier and Princeton alumnus William Ruckelshaus, who was running for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Democrat Birch Bayh. After the campaign, Daniels secured an internship in the office of then-Indianapolis mayor Richard Lugar, a Ruckelshaus ally. Daniels worked on Lugar's re-election campaign in 1971, and later, in.... Discover the Gregor Daniels popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Gregor Daniels books.