50 Fun Facts About Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan was born on 6 February 1911 in the small town of Tampico, in which state?

The family lived in a flat above a bakery on Main Street. He was the first US president born in that state, though Lincoln, Grant and Obama all launched their careers there.

What nickname did Reagan's father give him as a baby who looked like 'a fat little Dutchman'?

He was known by it through school, college and his radio days, and it stuck with old friends for life. His mother's 'Dutch boy' haircut helped it along.

Reagan's first paid job as a teenager was as what, on the Rock River near Dixon?

He worked seven summers at Lowell Park and always said one of the proudest statistics of his life was the number of swimmers he pulled out, which he tallied by notching a log.

Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932 with a joint major in economics and which other subject?

He was a C student who later joked that he majored in extracurricular activities. In 1982 he told the college that 'everything that has been good in my life began here'.

Before Hollywood, Reagan worked at WHO radio in Des Moines as a broadcaster for which baseball team?

He recreated games in the studio from bare telegraph reports, and once ad-libbed a string of foul balls when the wire went dead. It was a Cubs spring-training trip that took him to Hollywood.

Reagan's 1936 screen test led to a seven-year contract with which studio?

He would go on to appear in 53 films. His first, Love Is On the Air (1937), cast him safely as a radio announcer.

Reagan's nickname 'the Gipper' comes from a 1940 film about which college football coach?

Pat O'Brien played the Notre Dame coach who relays the dying Gipp's plea to 'win just one for the Gipper'. Reagan's campaigns revived the film and the press picked up the name.

Which 1942 film, in which Reagan wakes to find his legs amputated, gave his 1965 autobiography its title?

The line, delivered by his character Drake McHugh, was 'Where's the rest of me?'. Reagan called the film 'a slightly sordid but moving yarn' that 'made me a star'.

In Bedtime for Bonzo (1951), Reagan plays a professor raising what as if it were a human child?

During filming the animal nearly suffocated him by yanking on his necktie, which a crew member had to cut off. Reagan turned down the sequel, Bonzo Goes to College, as implausible.

Reagan's first marriage, in January 1940, was to which Oscar-winning actress?

The divorce was finalised in 1949, making him the only US president to have been divorced until Donald Trump. He married Nancy Davis in March 1952.

In 1947 Reagan was elected president of which Hollywood organisation?

He testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that year and, it later emerged, was an FBI informant on suspected communists in the union.

Through the 1950s Reagan hosted a TV anthology series and toured plants as a speaker for which company?

He visited all 135 of the company's plants and gave thousands of speeches, honing the pro-business message that later became known as 'The Speech'. GE dropped him in 1962.

Reagan, a lifelong Democrat who campaigned for Truman, registered as a Republican in which year?

He liked to say he hadn't left the Democratic Party, the party had left him. His first Republican act of note was the 1964 Goldwater speech two years later.

On behalf of which presidential candidate did Reagan deliver his 1964 'A Time for Choosing' address?

It raised about $1 million for a campaign that was already doomed, and was called the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan.

In which year was Reagan first elected governor of California?

He beat two-term incumbent Pat Brown by nearly a million votes and served two terms, from January 1967 to January 1975. Brown's son Jerry would later hold the office twice.

Reagan's 1976 bid for the Republican nomination ended in a narrow convention defeat to which sitting president?

It was the last time a major-party convention opened without a settled nominee. Ford went on to lose to Jimmy Carter, and Reagan came back four years later.

How many Electoral College votes did Reagan win in his 1980 landslide over Jimmy Carter?

Carter took only 49. Independent John Anderson won 6.6% of the popular vote but no states.

Which four-word phrase did Reagan use to brush off Carter in their October 1980 debate?

He reused it against Walter Mondale in 1984, and it became one of the most quoted lines in American debate history.

Which of Reagan's 1980 rivals for the Republican nomination derided his economic plan as "voodoo economics"?

Reagan then made him his running mate. The term Reaganomics itself is credited to radio broadcaster Paul Harvey.

Reagan's 1981 inauguration was the first held on which side of the Capitol?

The move faced west, towards the Mall and the country, and let far more people watch. He was 69, then the oldest person ever to take the oath.

What happened while Reagan was delivering his first inaugural address on 20 January 1981?

Reagan got word at the congressional luncheon that the planes had cleared Tehran's airspace and called it the perfect 'get-off line'. Carter, who had negotiated the release, flew to Germany to greet them.

On 30 March 1981 Reagan was shot outside which building in the US capital?

He had just addressed a union conference. A bullet ricocheted off the limousine and lodged in his lung, an inch from his heart; nobody realised he had been hit until he coughed up blood.

John Hinckley Jr. said he shot Reagan to impress which actress from Taxi Driver?

Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982, a verdict that led several states and Congress to rewrite their insanity laws. He was released unconditionally in 2022.

What did Reagan say to Nancy when she reached him at the hospital after the shooting?

He borrowed the line from boxer Jack Dempsey. To the surgeons he added, 'I hope you are all Republicans', and the lead surgeon, a Democrat, replied that today they all were.

Which Reagan staffer was permanently disabled in the 1981 shooting and later lent his name to a gun law?

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, requiring background checks, was signed by Bill Clinton in 1993. Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and officer Thomas Delahanty were also hit.

What was the job of the 11,000+ federal employees Reagan fired in August 1981 for defying a return-to-work order?

Their union, PATCO, had endorsed him in 1980. The strike lasted three days, the union was decertified, and employers across America took note that permanent replacement of strikers was now thinkable.

Whom did Reagan nominate in 1981 as the first woman on the US Supreme Court?

She was confirmed 99-0 and served 25 years, becoming the Court's pivotal swing vote. Reagan had promised during the 1980 campaign to appoint a woman.

How many of the 50 states did Reagan carry in his 1984 re-election against Walter Mondale?

Mondale won only his home state of Minnesota, by fewer than 4,000 votes, plus the District of Columbia. Reagan's 525 electoral votes remain the record.

Reagan's 1984 opponent Walter Mondale made history with his choice of running mate. Who was she?

She was the first woman on a major party's presidential ticket. It would be 24 years before another, Sarah Palin, and 36 before Kamala Harris won.

What two-word label did Reagan give the Soviet Union in a March 1983 speech to evangelicals?

He also called it 'the focus of evil in the modern world'. Some aides had cut the phrase from earlier drafts as too provocative; Reagan put it back.

Which senator's jibe about 'reckless Star Wars schemes' gave Reagan's SDI its nickname?

Reagan announced the missile-shield plan on 23 March 1983, asking scientists to render nuclear weapons 'impotent and obsolete'. The name from the film franchise stuck within a day.

In the Iran-Contra affair, arms-sale profits were diverted to rebels fighting which country's government?

Congress had banned aid to the Contras under the Boland Amendment. In March 1987 Reagan admitted that what began as a strategic opening 'deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages'.

Which Marine lieutenant colonel on the National Security Council staff ran the Iran-Contra scheme?

His televised testimony in 1987, in full uniform, made him a folk hero to some. He later ran for the Senate in Virginia and briefly led the National Rifle Association.

In which capital was the October 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit that collapsed over SDI?

They met at Höfði, a lonely white house on the shore. Though it ended without a deal, it set up the INF Treaty signed in Washington fourteen months later.

The 1987 INF Treaty eliminated ground-launched missiles with what range?

It was the first treaty to abolish a whole category of nuclear weapons rather than cap it. Reagan liked to quote the Russian proverb 'trust, but verify' at Gorbachev, who eventually protested that he said it at every meeting.

Where was Reagan standing when he said 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' on 12 June 1987?

Chief of staff Howard Baker and Colin Powell both wanted the line cut as 'unpresidential'; speechwriter Peter Robinson kept it and Reagan agreed. The wall came down 29 months later.

Who wrote Reagan's address to the nation on the evening of the Challenger disaster in 1986?

It closed with lines from 'High Flight', a 1941 sonnet by a 19-year-old pilot, John Gillespie Magee Jr., about slipping 'the surly bonds of Earth'. Many rank it among the finest presidential speeches.

Which Caribbean island did Reagan send US forces into on 25 October 1983?

Operation Urgent Fury followed a coup by hard-line Marxists. Margaret Thatcher, whose queen was Grenada's head of state, was furious at not being consulted.

Nancy Reagan's signature First Lady campaign, launched in 1982, had which three-word slogan?

It began when a schoolgirl in Oakland asked her what to do if offered drugs. Nancy also, it later emerged, consulted a San Francisco astrologer about the president's schedule after the shooting.

Reagan kept a jar of which sweet on the Cabinet Room table, even flying them on the Space Shuttle in 1983?

He took them up when he quit pipe smoking in the 1960s. Licorice was his favourite flavour, and Jelly Belly sent three and a half tons in red, white and blue for his 1981 inauguration.

What was Reagan's mountaintop ranch near Santa Barbara, the 'Western White House', called?

He spent almost a year of his presidency there in total, clearing brush and riding. Young America's Foundation bought it in 1998 and keeps it as it was, down to the jelly bean jar.

Reagan's presidential library, where he and Nancy are buried, sits in which Southern California city?

Its hangar holds the Boeing 707 that served as Air Force One for seven presidents, and the grounds include a graffiti-covered slab of the Berlin Wall.

How old was Ronald Reagan when he died at his Bel Air home in June 2004?

He was at that point the longest-lived president in American history, a record since passed by Ford, George H. W. Bush and Carter. The immediate cause was pneumonia.

In 1998, on Reagan's 87th birthday, Clinton signed a law renaming which facility in his honour?

Many Democrats grumbled that Congress was honouring the man who fired the air traffic controllers with an airport. Washington's Metro refused for years to add his name to the station signs.

Reagan's mother Nelle, whom he credited with his faith, belonged to which denomination?

His father was a lapsed Irish Catholic with a drinking problem, so Ronald followed his mother into her church, and Eureka College was one of its schools.

What was the title of Reagan's 1937 Hollywood debut film?

He made thirty films, mostly B pictures, before beginning military service in April 1942.

Which California gun-control law did Reagan sign in 1967 in response to Black Panther copwatching?

It prohibited the public carrying of firearms and was the state's most restrictive gun law at the time.

Which Federal Reserve chairman, appointed by Reagan in 1987, raised rates and set off the Black Monday crash?

He succeeded Paul Volcker, whose tight-money policy had fought the stagflation of the early 1980s.

Besides Sandra Day O'Connor, which two Associate Justices did Reagan appoint to the Supreme Court?

He also elevated William Rehnquist to Chief Justice.

What did Reagan publicly urge support for in a March 1991 New York Times op-ed, surprising many?

In 1994 he joined Ford and Carter in urging House members to back the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.