Presidential Ponderings Trivia Quiz

Answer: Gerald Ford

Ford won election to the U.S, House of Representatives from Michigan in 1948. He served in the House until 1973 when, upon the resignation of Vice-President Spiro Agnew, he was named to the position under the provisions of the 25th Amendment of the constitution. When Richard Nixon resigned as president in 1974 Ford ascended to the presidency.

Answer: John Quincy Adams

Adams, the son of John Adams and an excellent swimmer, liked to swim naked in the Potomac River most days of the year. He said he found it very conducive to his health. Other president who liked to swim in the buff were Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt and John Kennedy.

Answer: Ten years

A vice-president who replaces an existing president may serve out as many as two years of that president's term and be eligible for two full terms of his or her own. If a vice-president serves for more than two years as a replacement he or she can only be elected once.

Answer: Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan, the 40th president, is remembered as a Californian but was born (1911) and grew up in Illinois. He moved to California in 1947 in hopes of becoming an actor. It worked. He was in many films and served as president of the Screen Actors Guild before entering politics in the early 1960s.

It is often mentioned that in Illinois he was a lifeguard and rescued 77 people over six years. A newspaper columnist opined that several of those rescued were young women, who were perhaps not in danger of drowning but looking for a way to meet the handsome young lifeguard!

Answer: John Adams

George Washington was not seriously opposed for the office of president. However, John Adams did need to finish second in the Electoral College voting to become the vice president - until the XII Amendment, the first runner-up in the election for president became the vice-president.

Answer: Calvin Coolidge

Though three U.S. presidents died on the fourth of July, John Calvin Coolidge was the only one (as of this writing) to be born on the fourth of July (1872). He was the Republican vice-presidential nominee when Warren G. Harding ran for, and won, the presidency in 1920.

When Harding died in office in 1923 Coolidge became president. At the time he was visiting his father in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. A group of horsemen arrived in the middle of the night (there were few telephones in rural Vermont at the time) to tell him of Harding's death. Coolidge's father, a notary public, legally swore him in as the new president.

Answer: No one

There was no method for replacing the vice-president before this Amendment. There had been fifteen times in U.S. history when there hadn't been a vice-president.

Answer: Dwight Eisenhower

Eisenhower was a U.S. Army general during World War II and was named as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. He entered the 1952 presidential race because he opposed the isolationist foreign policy of Senator Robert Taft. He won the nomination and the general election in a landslide, as he did in the 1956 election.

He was a strong foreign policy advocate and was responsible for the U.S. Interstate Highway System, which was named in his honor.

Answer: Surveyor

Washington began his time in public office as the surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia in 1749. He received on-the-job military training, as well as command of the Virginia Regiment, during the French and Indian War. He was appointed Commanding General of the Continental Army in 1775, resigning his commission after the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783.

He was elected to the presidency twice by the Electoral College and served in a non-partisan manner.

Answer: Nuclear physicist

As a naval officer, Carter was picked by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the navy's nuclear submarine program and was studying nuclear physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York when his father died; he left school to take over the family peanut farming business.