Gerald Ford Trivia
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50 free Gerald Ford trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Gerald Ford never won a national election, yet he served as both vice president and president. He was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha, became an Eagle Scout, played centre on two undefeated Michigan teams, turned down the Lions and the Packers, worked as a model and spent 25 years in the House dreaming of being Speaker. Then Spiro Agnew resigned, Watergate consumed Nixon, and within ten months Ford was in the Oval Office telling the country its long national nightmare was over. These 50 questions cover the pardon that probably cost him the 1976 election, the Whip Inflation Now buttons, the fall of Saigon, the Mayaguez rescue, two assassination attempts in seventeen days, the Helsinki Accords, the swine-flu vaccine, the Chevy Chase pratfalls, and the blunder about Eastern Europe in the second debate. The set moves from basics anyone remembers to details for real presidential buffs: his jersey number, his ship, his autobiography and the Supreme Court case he carried in his wallet.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ford is the only US president who never won what?
National election
National election. Ford was appointed vice president in 1973, became president when Nixon resigned eight months later, and then lost his only run for the White House in 1976.
Q 02What name was Ford given at birth?
Leslie Lynch King Jr.
Leslie Lynch King Jr. His mother left his violent father weeks after the birth, and he grew up under his stepfather's name, which he did not make legal until he was 22.
Q 03In which Nebraska city was Ford born, before his mother moved with him to Grand Rapids?
Omaha
Omaha. He was born in his paternal grandparents' house there; it was torn down after a 1971 fire, and the lot became the Gerald R. Ford Birthsite and Gardens.
Q 04Ford is the only president to have earned which Boy Scout rank?
Eagle
Eagle. He earned scouting's top rank in 1927, and when his casket came home to Grand Rapids in 2007, uniformed Scouts lined the streets to salute it.
Q 05Ford played center for which college football team in the early 1930s?
Michigan Wolverines
Michigan Wolverines. He played on the national champions of 1932 and 1933, then was voted most valuable player in 1934, a season in which the team won one game and lost seven.
Q 06Ford spent the summer of 1936 working as a seasonal ranger in which national park?
Yellowstone
Yellowstone. The law school he wanted had first turned him down because he coached full time, and he spent that summer posted to the park's Canyon Station.
Q 07Ford turned down NFL offers from the Green Bay Packers and which other team?
Detroit Lions
Detroit Lions. He passed on pro football for a $2,400-a-year job coaching football and boxing at a university, hoping it would get him into its law school.
Q 08Where did Ford earn his law degree in 1941?
Yale Law School
Yale Law School. It first rejected him because he was coaching Yale's football and boxing teams full time, then admitted him on a trial basis in 1938.
Q 09Ford served in the Pacific aboard which light carrier, named for a battle of the Mexican–American War?
USS Monterey
USS Monterey. She was laid down as the cruiser Dayton and turned into a carrier before launch; Ford was in her crew from her commissioning in 1943 until the end of 1944.
Q 10What nearly swept Ford off his aircraft carrier in December 1944?
A typhoon
A typhoon. Typhoon Cobra sank three destroyers and killed some 790 sailors; on Ford's ship, planes tore loose and started a fire, and he came within inches of going over the side.
Q 11Ford said World War II turned him against which outlook, the creed of the congressman he unseated in 1948?
Isolationism
Isolationism. Ford came home from the Pacific "a converted internationalist" and beat five-term incumbent Bartel Jonkman, an avowed isolationist, two to one in the Republican primary.
Q 12Which job was Ford's ambition during his 25 years in Congress?
House Speaker
House Speaker. Republicans never won a House majority while he led them, and he had decided to serve one more term and retire when Nixon made him vice president instead.
Q 13Which president appointed Ford to the Warren Commission in 1963?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Q 21Whom did Ford nominate as his own vice president on August 20, 1974?
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller. Congress took four months to confirm the former New York governor, and within a year conservative anger had pushed Ford to drop him from the 1976 ticket.
Q 22Which early critic of the Nixon pardon honored Ford for it in 2001?
Ted Kennedy
Ted Kennedy. Presenting Ford with the Profile in Courage Award, named for his brother's book, he said he had opposed the pardon in 1974 but that time had shown Ford made the right call.
Q 23In November 1974, Ford became the first sitting US president to visit which Asian country?
Japan
Lyndon B. Johnson. He chose Ford as one of two House members on the panel, a favour that soured: within a few years Ford was his chief Republican critic and the butt of his jokes.
Q 14Ford's 1965 book defending the Warren Report was titled what?
Portrait of the Assassin
Portrait of the Assassin. Written with John R. Stiles, it backed the commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, a conclusion Ford was still defending in print in 2007.
Q 15The House Republicans who backed Ford to oust leader Charles Halleck in 1965 were nicknamed what?
Young Turks
Young Turks. After the 1964 election handed Democrats their biggest House majority since 1936, the rebels ran Ford against Halleck and won.
Q 16Ford's televised press conferences with Senator Everett Dirksen were nicknamed what?
The Ev and Jerry Show
The Ev and Jerry Show. Ford later said he had played straight man to Dirksen in the televised sessions, where the pair took turns picking apart the Great Society.
Q 17Whose resignation in October 1973 opened the vice presidency for Ford?
Spiro Agnew
Spiro Agnew. He resigned and pleaded no contest to tax evasion the same day, and congressional leaders told Nixon that Ford was the one replacement they would confirm.
Q 18Before the 25th Amendment seated Ford, who filled a vacant vice presidency?
Nobody
Nobody. The office stayed empty: sixteen vice presidents had died, resigned or moved up, leaving the job vacant more than a fifth of the time, and Ford was the first chosen under the new rule.
Q 19Which White House chief of staff warned Ford on August 1, 1974 to prepare for the presidency?
Alexander Haig
Ford told his wife Betty they would never live in the vice president's house.
Q 20Where in the White House did Ford take the oath of office on August 9, 1974?
East Room
East Room. Chief Justice Warren Burger swore him in there just after noon, and Ford asked a country that had not elected him to confirm him with its prayers: "our long national nightmare is over."
Japan. Dwight Eisenhower's planned 1960 trip was cancelled after violent protests in Tokyo, so the first presidential visit waited for Ford's state visit to Tokyo and Kyoto.
Q 24Which word completes Ford's 1974 denial to Congress about the Nixon pardon: "There was no ___, period, under no circumstances"?
Deal
Deal. Ford chose to go to Capitol Hill in person to answer the suspicion that he had traded the pardon for Nixon's resignation.
Q 25Ford privately justified pardoning Nixon with a 1915 ruling that accepting a pardon amounts to what?
A confession of guilt
A confession of guilt. Friends said Ford carried the passage from the Burdick ruling in his wallet, to show that Nixon had admitted wrongdoing simply by accepting.
Q 26Ford replaced every Nixon cabinet member except Treasury Secretary William Simon and which secretary of state?
Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger. He kept the State Department through Ford's 1975 shake-up, the Halloween Massacre, but lost his second job as national security adviser to Brent Scowcroft.
Q 27Whom did Ford name the youngest-ever Secretary of Defense in 1975?
Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Rumsfeld. He was 43 when he left the White House for the Pentagon, and his deputy Dick Cheney, then 34, took over his old job as Ford's chief of staff.
Q 28Ford made George H. W. Bush director of which agency in late 1975?
CIA
CIA. Ford called Bush home from his post as envoy to China to replace William Colby, who lost the job as congressional inquiries laid bare years of agency abuses.
Q 29Ford's 1974 WIN lapel buttons urged Americans to fight which economic problem?
Inflation
Inflation. WIN stood for Whip Inflation Now; about 100,000 Americans wrote in to join, but the buttons soon became a joke, and by January Ford had switched to fighting recession with a tax cut.
Q 30Which paper ran the headline 'Ford to City: Drop Dead' in 1975?
New York Daily News
New York Daily News. Ford never said those words: he had vowed to veto a bailout of the city, and within two months he reversed course and backed $2.3 billion in federal loans.