J. Edgar Hoover Trivia
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50 free J. Edgar Hoover trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This J. Edgar Hoover trivia quiz covers the man who ran America's federal police for 48 years under eight presidents and built both the modern FBI and a machine for blackmailing the powerful. The easy questions cover the agency, the presidents at either end of his tenure, the gangster shot outside a Chicago cinema and the building that bears his name. From there the quiz walks through the career: the Library of Congress messenger job, the Palmer Raids, the Coolidge appointment, the fingerprint files and crime lab, the G-Man image, the Mafia he denied existed and the wiretaps Roosevelt authorised. The hard end covers the plan to suspend habeas corpus and detain 12,000 Americans, COINTELPRO and the Media burglary, the Church Committee, the King blackmail letter, the Warren Commission, the Truman 'Gestapo' quote, Clyde Tolson, the beagles and Cairn terriers, the lying in state, the ten-year term limit passed after his death, and the actors from Broderick Crawford to Leonardo DiCaprio who have played him. Every answer was checked against J. Edgar Hoover's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our FBI, Cold War and US presidents quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Alvin Karpis, the gangster Hoover helped arrest in 1936, went on to serve 26 years in which prison?
Alcatraz
Alcatraz. Hoover flew to New Orleans to join the raid after a senator taunted him for never making an arrest, and with no handcuffs to hand, an agent bound Karpis with his necktie.
Q 02Who was 'Deep Throat', the Watergate source passed over to succeed Hoover as FBI director?
Mark Felt
Mark Felt. The senior FBI man wanted Hoover's chair and was angry when the White House gave it to an outsider with no FBI experience; he kept his Watergate role secret until 2005.
Q 03Under which president did Hoover become director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge. His new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, sacked the Bureau's chief in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal and handed the job to the 29-year-old deputy.
Q 04Which three-word motto did Hoover's Bureau adopt in 1935?
Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity
Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity. It was coined the year the Bureau was renamed the FBI so that the motto would spell out the new initials, which a Bureau magazine welcomed as its first dignified abbreviation.
Q 05In which city was Hoover born on New Year's Day 1895 and did he live his entire life?
Washington, D.C.
He was born on Capitol Hill, on the site of a church that now has a stained-glass window dedicated to him.
Q 06Until he was 43, Hoover lived with which relative?
His mother
His mother. He was closer to Annie Hoover, the family's disciplinarian, than to anyone else in it, and the FBI director stayed in the Seward Square house where he was born until she died in 1938.
Q 07How did the young Hoover overcome a boyhood stutter?
He taught himself to talk very fast
He taught himself to talk very fast. The rapid-fire delivery stayed with him for life, and as a schoolboy he took it straight onto his high school's debating team.
Q 08Where did the 18-year-old Hoover take his first job, as a messenger?
The Library of Congress
The Library of Congress. He clerked there by day while studying law at night, and later turned its lessons in indexing on the suspects and radicals in the Bureau's files.
Q 09Where did Hoover earn his law degrees in 1916 and 1917?
George Washington
George Washington University. He went straight from high school and took its law classes at night after a day's paid work, adding a master's the year after his first degree.
Q 10Which 1919-20 crackdown on radicals during the First Red Scare did the 24-year-old Hoover help carry out?
The Palmer Raids
The Palmer Raids. Named for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose own house anarchists had bombed in 1919, they swept up thousands of suspects, yet only 556 were ever deported.
Q 11Which policy for FBI special agents, in force for more than 40 years, was dropped ten days after Hoover died?
Men only
Men only. Hoover inherited two women agents in 1924 and appointed a third himself, but after she resigned in 1928 no woman carried the badge again until July 1972.
Q 12Which gangster was ambushed and killed by Bureau agents outside Chicago's Biograph Theater in July 1934?
John Dillinger
John Dillinger. He was betrayed by a brothel madam hoping to avoid deportation, remembered as the 'lady in red' although the dress she wore so agents could spot her was orange.
Q 13Which Wisconsin lodge saw a botched 1934 Bureau raid on a bank-robbing gang kill an agent and a bystander?
Little Bohemia
Q 21What was the name of the covert 'dirty tricks' programme Hoover formalised in 1956?
COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO. Short for Counterintelligence Program, it began against the Communist Party and spread to civil rights and antiwar groups, using burglaries, illegal wiretaps and planted rumours.
Q 22How was Hoover's covert dirty-tricks programme exposed in 1971?
Activists burgled an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania
Activists burgled an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. The eight struck while the country was tuned to the Ali-Frazier title fight and posted the files to newspapers; the Bureau never caught them.
Q 23Which senator chaired the 1975 committee that declared Hoover's dirty-tricks programme illegal?
Little Bohemia. While agents traded fire with the front of the lodge, every one of the gangsters slipped out through its unguarded back and got clean away.
Q 14Whose kidnapping led Congress to make the crime a federal one, handing Hoover's Bureau a new field of work?
The Lindbergh baby
The Lindbergh baby. The aviator's 20-month-old son was taken in 1932; Congress let federal agents chase kidnappers across state lines, and Bureau handwriting analysis of the ransom notes helped convict Bruno Hauptmann.
Q 15Which group did Hoover single out in the late 1960s as the greatest threat to America's internal security?
The Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party. Hoover vowed that 1969 would be its last year, and his agents set out to break it, even working to undermine its free breakfasts for schoolchildren.
Q 16Which Attorney General forced Hoover into a reluctant campaign against the Mafia?
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy. For years Hoover had insisted there was no national crime syndicate; only under pressure from the president's own brother did the FBI go after the mob in earnest.
Q 17Which film star, watched by Hoover's FBI as a suspected communist, had his US re-entry permit revoked in 1952?
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin. The news reached the British-born star at sea, on his way to the London premiere of Limelight; rather than fight to return, he settled in Switzerland.
Q 18How were the Nazi saboteurs landed by U-boat in Florida and on Long Island caught?
One of them turned himself in
One of them turned himself in. George Dasch phoned the FBI within days of landing and then confessed in person; all eight were in custody in about two weeks, and six went to the electric chair.
Q 19Which president first gave Hoover permission to wiretap people suspected of subversive activities?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt. He wanted fascists and communists watched as war loomed, but Hoover stretched the mandate until his lists of suspect Americans included the president's own wife, Eleanor.
Q 20Hoover's 1950 emergency plan listed 12,000 people and sought to suspend which legal safeguard?
Habeas corpus
Habeas corpus. With the writ suspended, the 12,000, some 97 per cent of them US citizens, were to be rounded up and held in federal prisons and military bases; no president is known to have approved the plan.
Frank Church
Frank Church. The Idaho senator's inquiry into the FBI, CIA and NSA led the Senate to create its permanent Select Committee on Intelligence the following year.
Q 24To which civil rights leader did Hoover's FBI send an anonymous 1964 letter he read as urging suicide?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. The package also held a tape from FBI bugs in his hotel rooms, and although it was unsigned he guessed at once who had sent it.
Q 25Before the CIA existed, Hoover's FBI ran the nation's wartime foreign intelligence in which part of the world?
Latin America
Latin America. From 1940 his Special Intelligence Service sent undercover agents across Central and South America, where German spies were busiest, while other agencies took the rest of the globe.
Q 26Which president waived the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1964 so Hoover could stay on indefinitely?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson. Hoover was due to retire on his 70th birthday, New Year's Day 1965; the waiver from his friend in the White House kept him in office for seven more years, until his death.
Q 27Which president was recorded in 1971 saying he would not fire Hoover because he feared his reprisals?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon. He feared Hoover knew enough to bring the government down with him, so he backed away from forcing him out, and the director died in office a few months later.
Q 28How did Hoover die on 2 May 1972?
A heart attack at home
A heart attack at home. He died in his sleep at 77, still in the post he had held for 48 years; no president of either party had been willing to remove him.
Q 29Which honour did Congress grant Hoover's body the day after his death?
Lying in state in the Capitol
Lying in state in the Capitol. His coffin rested in the Rotunda where Abraham Lincoln's once had, an honour that before him had gone almost entirely to presidents, generals and members of Congress.
Q 30Where is Hoover buried, next to his parents and a sister who died in infancy?
Congressional Cemetery
Congressional Cemetery. He lies in the family plot there, and three years later the companion who inherited his estate was buried a few yards away.