Secret Service Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Secret Service trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The United States Secret Service was created on the day Abraham Lincoln was shot, but not to guard presidents; its job was catching counterfeiters, and it took another assassination, William McKinley's in 1901, before Congress asked it to protect the President at all. This quiz covers the agency's whole story: the Treasury Department years, the Blair House shootout, the agents who leapt onto Kennedy's limousine and took a bullet for Reagan, the move to Homeland Security, the cybercrime task forces, and the code names for everything from Air Force One to the Situation Room. It is written for history buffs, true-crime readers and anyone who has watched a motorcade go by and wondered what the earpieces are for. Early questions are approachable; later ones ask for dates, names of directors and the odd rule about who is allowed to refuse protection. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Secret Service and its code names, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Secret Service is famous for guarding presidents, but what was it founded in 1865 to stop?
Counterfeit money
Counterfeit money. By the end of the Civil War about a third of the cash in circulation was fake, so the new agency was set up inside the Treasury to hunt the forgers.
Q 02Which federal department has the Secret Service belonged to since 2003?
Homeland Security
Homeland Security. The department was created after the September 11 attacks and absorbed the Secret Service on March 1, 2003, ending its 138 years inside the Treasury.
Q 03Whose assassination prompted Congress to ask the Secret Service to protect the President?
William McKinley
William McKinley. Three Secret Service men were already guarding him informally when he was shot in Buffalo in 1901; only afterwards did Congress ask the agency to protect presidents.
Q 04What happened on the same day Abraham Lincoln approved the creation of the Secret Service?
He was shot that evening
He was shot that evening. Lincoln gave his Treasury secretary the nod on April 14, 1865, hours before going to Ford's Theatre, and the agency he approved did not guard presidents for decades.
Q 05Which candidate was given Secret Service protection in May 2007, earlier in a campaign than anyone before?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama. His detail began about eighteen months before the 2008 election; Hillary Clinton already had agents as a former first lady, so hers did not count as candidate protection.
Q 06What is the nickname of the armored Cadillac presidential limousine introduced in 2018?
The Beast
The Beast. It only looks like a Cadillac sedan: it is widely reported to sit on a heavy truck chassis, and in Secret Service radio traffic it goes by the code name Stagecoach.
Q 07Which agent leapt onto President Kennedy's limousine in Dallas to shield the First Lady?
Clint Hill
Clint Hill. He was assigned to Jacqueline Kennedy, not the President, and told 60 Minutes in tears in 1975 that had he reached the car a second sooner he could have taken the last bullet himself.
Q 08Which agent threw his body over Vice President Lyndon Johnson when the shots rang out in Dallas?
Rufus Youngblood
Rufus Youngblood. He vaulted over the front seat to cover Johnson, who phoned the agency's chief that evening to praise him and later called it as brave an act as he had ever seen.
Q 09Which agent spread his stance to shield President Reagan in 1981 and took a bullet meant for him?
Tim McCarthy
Tim McCarthy. Instead of ducking he turned to face the gunman and made himself as big a target as he could; he recovered and later spent 26 years as a police chief in Illinois.
Q 10Where did agent Jerry Parr divert Reagan's motorcade after the 1981 shooting?
George Washington University Hospital
George Washington University Hospital. Parr first headed for the White House, believing Reagan unhurt; when the President began coughing up blood he ordered the car to the hospital instead.
Q 11With the White House gutted for rebuilding in 1950, gunmen attacked President Truman at which temporary home?
Blair House
Blair House. Truman was napping in an upstairs bedroom when two Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire at the front door, and neither of them got inside.
Q 12Mortally wounded guarding President Truman, officer Leslie Coffelt did what?
Shot a gunman dead
Shot a gunman dead. Hit in the abdomen at his sentry booth, Coffelt still drew his revolver and killed Griselio Torresola with a single shot to the head; he died in hospital about four hours later.
Q 13How did William Craig, the first agent to die guarding a president, lose his life in 1902?
A carriage crash
Q 21Which organization actually keeps the list of code names that Secret Service protectees choose from?
White House Communications Agency
White House Communications Agency. The Secret Service only uses the names: the list comes from the military unit that runs the president's phones and radios, and each family's names share a first letter.
Q 22What was Vice President Dick Cheney's Secret Service code name?
Angler
Angler. Cheney was an avid fisherman, and the rest of the family kept to the letter A: his wife Lynne, a writer, was Author.
Q 23Which vice president had the code name "Hoosier"?
Mike Pence
A carriage crash. The carriage taking Theodore Roosevelt through western Massachusetts was wrecked when a trolley car bore down on it, killing Craig months after the agency began guarding presidents full time.
Q 14Whose 1968 assassination led Congress to authorize protection for major presidential candidates?
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy. Candidates had no federal protection then: his bodyguards in Los Angeles were a former federal agent and two athletes, Olympic champion Rafer Johnson and footballer Rosey Grier.
Q 15Which former president gave up his Secret Service protection, saying it would save the government money?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon. He gave it up in 1985: former presidents are free to turn the protection down, but a sitting president and vice president have no such choice, because the law does not let them decline it.
Q 16Which president had the Secret Service code name Deacon?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter. The name suited a devout Baptist who taught Sunday school in Plains, Georgia, and kept a class going in Washington while he was president.
Q 17Which 2016 presidential candidate was given the Secret Service code name Mogul?
Donald Trump
Donald Trump. Handed a list of about ten words beginning with M when his detail started in November 2015, he sent back the ones he liked; Melania Trump, a former model, became Muse.
Q 18Which two Secret Service code names have been used for Air Force One?
Angel or Cowpuncher
Angel or Cowpuncher. The public call sign has a story too: 'Air Force One' was coined after controllers confused Eisenhower's plane with an airliner using the same flight number.
Q 19Which presidential retreat was code-named Cactus?
Camp David
Camp David. The camp sits in wooded Maryland mountains with no cactus in sight, while Lyndon Johnson's Texas ranch, where the name might seem to belong, was Volcano.
Q 20Which building carries the Secret Service code name "Punch bowl"?
The Capitol
The Capitol. Code words like this date from the days of open radio channels, when agents had to say where a president was going without telling anyone listening in.
Mike Pence. Hoosier is the nickname for a native of Indiana, the state he governed before becoming vice president, and his wife Karen kept to the letter H as Hummingbird.
Q 24What was Kamala Harris's Secret Service code name?
Pioneer
Pioneer. Harris picked it from an approved list in August 2020, days after becoming the first Black woman and first Indian American on a major party's presidential ticket.
Q 25Which entertainer was given the code name "Napoleon" by the Secret Service?
Frank Sinatra
Antonio Banderas got "Zorro" and Pope John Paul II was "Halo".
Q 26Which visiting monarch was code-named Kittyhawk?
Queen Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II. Since the early 1970s the Secret Service has guarded visiting heads of state on American soil, so foreign royals get radio names like everyone else it protects.
Q 27A gunman firing at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in Miami in 1933 fatally wounded which city's mayor instead?
Chicago
Chicago. Mayor Anton Cermak was standing beside Roosevelt's open car when Giuseppe Zangara fired from the crowd, and he died of the wound nineteen days later.
Q 28The Secret Service's Uniformed Division was established in 1922 under what name?
White House Police
White House Police. The force answered to the president's military aide until 1930, when a stranger strolled into the dining room while Hoover was eating and he handed it to the Secret Service.
Q 29Besides the White House, what does the Secret Service's Uniformed Division protect across Washington, D.C.?
Foreign diplomatic missions
Foreign diplomatic missions. The duty arrived with a 1970 law that also renamed the force the Executive Protective Service, turning the president's house guard into a city-wide police force.
Q 30Both attempts to shoot President Gerald Ford in September 1975 came in which state?
California
California. Charles Manson follower Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme aimed a pistol at him in Sacramento, and seventeen days later Sara Jane Moore fired a shot at him in San Francisco.