Ronald Reagan Trivia
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50 free Ronald Reagan trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
45 free Ronald Reagan trivia questions with answers. Ronald Reagan packed several lives into one: small-town lifeguard, Cubs radio man, Warner Bros. contract player, union president, General Electric pitchman, governor of California and, at 69, the oldest man yet to be sworn in as president. This quiz walks through all of them, from the nickname his father gave him in the cradle to the hilltop library in Simi Valley where he is buried. The presidential rounds cover the things people still argue about: the 1981 shooting outside the Washington Hilton and what he said to Nancy afterwards, the air traffic controllers, Sandra Day O'Connor, the 49-state landslide, the 'evil empire' speech, Star Wars, Grenada, Iran-Contra, Reykjavík, the INF Treaty and the Brandenburg Gate. Lighter questions take in Bonzo the chimp, Kings Row, jelly beans in space and the airport that now bears his name. About a third of the questions are easy enough for anyone who lived through the 1980s; the rest reward people who have read a biography or two. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, and each question shows its citation and a short explanation once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ronald Reagan was born on 6 February 1911 in the small town of Tampico, in which state?
Illinois
Illinois was home through his childhood, as his salesman father's search for work moved the family from town to town before they settled in Dixon in 1920.
Q 02What nickname did Reagan's father give him as a baby, a name he still went by as a young man?
Dutch
Dutch came from his father's habit of calling his infant son a 'fat little Dutchman', and the name stuck with Reagan well beyond childhood.
Q 03Reagan's first paid job as a teenager was as what, on the Rock River near Dixon?
A lifeguard
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.
Q 04Which word completes the opening line of Reagan's 1984 campaign ad, 'It's ___ again in America'?
Morning
Morning again in America was the ad's promise, and it closed by asking why voters would ever want to return to where they were less than four years before.
Q 05Before Hollywood, Reagan worked at WHO radio in Des Moines as a broadcaster for which baseball team?
The Chicago Cubs
The Chicago Cubs' games reached the station only as sketchy teletype reports, so he improvised a running account of the action from the studio.
Q 06Which Hollywood studio signed Reagan to a contract after a screen test, launching his film career?
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. lost him to the Army in April 1942, and poor eyesight kept him out of combat, so he spent the war making training films.
Q 07Reagan's nickname 'the Gipper' comes from a 1940 film about which college football coach?
Knute Rockne
Knute Rockne's halftime plea to 'win one for the Gipper', a request the dying George Gipp supposedly made in 1920, was tied by sportswriters to Notre Dame's 1928 upset of Army.
Q 08Which 1942 film, in which Reagan wakes to find his legs amputated, gave his 1965 autobiography its title?
Kings Row
Many critics rated Kings Row his best performance, yet after wartime Army service he struggled to recapture his pre-war popularity.
Q 09In Bedtime for Bonzo (1951), Reagan plays a professor raising what as if it were a human child?
A chimpanzee
A chimpanzee played Bonzo, but weeks after the film's premiere it died in a zoo fire, so the 1952 sequel had to cast another chimp.
Q 10Reagan's first marriage, in January 1940, was to which Oscar-winning actress?
Jane Wyman
Jane Wyman filed for divorce in 1948, and accounts of the split point partly to politics, which absorbed Reagan far more than it did her.
Q 11In 1947 Reagan was elected president of which Hollywood organisation?
The Screen Actors Guild
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.
Q 12Through the 1950s Reagan hosted a TV anthology series and toured plants as a speaker for which company?
General Electric
General Electric plant tours gave him years of practice speaking against big government, the theme that later carried his political career.
Q 13Before turning Republican in 1962, Reagan was a Democrat who admired which president?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Q 21What happened minutes after Reagan was sworn in as president on 20 January 1981?
Iran freed 52 US hostages
Iran freed 52 US hostages after 444 days in captivity, and Reagan broke the news to congressional leaders at his inaugural lunch.
Q 22On 30 March 1981, Reagan was shot outside which building?
The Washington Hilton hotel
The Washington Hilton hotel shooting left a bullet less than an inch from his heart, yet at first Reagan thought agents had only broken his ribs shoving him into the limousine.
Q 23John Hinckley Jr. said he shot Reagan to impress which actress from Taxi Driver?
Jodie Foster
Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal gave Reagan's father a job, a debt Reagan still acknowledged long after he turned against Roosevelt's politics.
Q 14On behalf of which presidential candidate did Reagan deliver his 1964 'A Time for Choosing' address?
Barry Goldwater
Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide, but the speech raised $1 million for his campaign and launched Reagan's political career.
Q 15Reagan won California's governorship in 1966 by defeating which incumbent?
Pat Brown
Pat Brown's popularity sagged after the Watts riots and the student protests at Berkeley, which many voters thought he had handled poorly.
Q 16Reagan's 1976 bid for the Republican nomination ended in a narrow convention defeat to which sitting president?
Gerald Ford
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.
Q 17Which congressman quit the 1980 Republican race to run as an independent?
John Anderson
John Anderson finished a distant third with less than 7 percent of the vote, drawing support away from both Carter and Reagan.
Q 18Which phrase did Reagan use to brush off Jimmy Carter's attack in their October 1980 debate?
'There you go again'
'There you go again' returned in 1984, when Walter Mondale turned it on Reagan, claiming he had tried to cut Medicare after the 1980 election.
Q 19Which of Reagan's 1980 rivals for the Republican nomination derided his economic plan as "voodoo economics"?
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush had mocked Reagan's tax-cut plans, yet after losing the primaries he became Reagan's running mate.
Q 20Reagan's 1981 inauguration was the first held at which part of the Capitol?
The West Front
The West Front's first inauguration was unusually warm, at 55°F, but four years later bitter cold drove Reagan's second public swearing-in indoors to the Rotunda.
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.
Q 24What did Reagan say to Nancy when she reached him at the hospital after the shooting?
'Honey, I forgot to duck.'
'Honey, I forgot to duck.' was not his only joke that day: on the operating table he told the surgeons he hoped they were all Republicans.
Q 25Which Reagan aide, permanently disabled in the 1981 shooting, later lent his name to a gun law?
Press secretary James Brady
Press secretary James Brady was shot in the head, and when he died in 2014 a medical examiner ruled his death a homicide caused by that 1981 wound.
Q 26What was the job of the striking federal workers Reagan fired in August 1981 for defying his return-to-work order?
Air traffic controllers
Air traffic controllers' union had backed Reagan in 1980, yet he fired the strikers and kept planes flying with supervisors, loyal controllers and new hires.
Q 27Whom did Reagan nominate in 1981 as the first woman on the US Supreme Court?
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor could not land a law-firm job after Stanford because she was a woman, so she began her career as a government lawyer in San Mateo County.
Q 28Which was the only state Walter Mondale won against Reagan in the 1984 election?
Minnesota
Minnesota backed its native son, even though Mondale had openly promised in his acceptance speech to raise taxes to cut the federal deficit.
Q 29Which congresswoman did Walter Mondale choose as his running mate against Reagan in 1984?
Geraldine Ferraro
Geraldine Ferraro's pick excited the campaign, but its momentum stalled once questions arose about her husband's business finances.
Q 30What two-word label did Reagan give the Soviet Union in a March 1983 speech to evangelicals?
'Evil empire'
'Evil empire' was a label Reagan later disowned: visiting Moscow in 1988, he told a reporter he had been talking about another time, another era.