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Politics and History

  1. What two future Presidents were first elected to Congress in 1946?
    Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

  2. What was the last major Presidential candidate who sported a beard?
    1916-- Charles Evans Hughes (Republican Party).

  3. Who was Republican Presidential candidate Harold Stassen's floor manager at the GOP convention in 1952?
    Current (1985) Chief Justice Warren Burger.

  4. Who beat Republican incumbent Crocker Jarman in a California Senate election in the early 1970s?
    Bill McKay (from the movie "The Candidate").

  5. Who came in first, second, and third in the 1984 Democratic caucus in Iowa, and the primary in New Hampshire?
    Iowa-- Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, George McGovern; New Hampshire-- Hart, Mondale, John Glenn.
Identify the following individuals:

  1. Homer Thornberry;
    President Johnson's 1968 nominee to replace Abe Fortas on the Supreme Court (the nomination was later withdrawn).

  2. Robert Leffingwell;
    The fictional nominee for Secretary of State in Alan Drury's"Advise and Consent."

  3. Alexander Stevens;
    Jefferson Davis' Vice President in the Confederate States.

  4. Jefferson Smith;
    Jimmy Stewart's idealistic character in "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington"

  5. Richard Sweicker.
    Ronald Reagan's would-be running mate in 1976.
Identify the assassins of the following political figures:

  1. Abraham Lincoln;
    John Wilkes Booth

  2. William McKinley;
    Leon Czolgosz

  3. John F. Kennedy;
    Lee Harvey Oswald (with help from Fidel Castro, the Mafia, the CIA, the Montreal Canadiens, and Frankie Avalon)

  4. Robert F. Kennedy;
    Sirhan Sirhan

  5. Martin Luther King Jr.;
    James Earl Ray

  6. Huey Long;
    Carl A. Weiss

  7. James Garfield
    Charles J. Guiteau

  8. There were four major candidates in the 1948 Presidential election: Harry Truman for the Democrats, Thomas Dewey for the Republicans, Henry Wallace for the Progressives, and Strom Thurmond for the States Rights Party. Who were their FOUR running mates?
    Truman-- Alben Barkley; Dewey-- Earl Warren; Wallace-- Glen Taylor; Thurmond-- ? Wright.
Quotations: Identify the speaker, and the context in which the speaker spoke the following four quotations.

  1. "There is no force so powerful as an idea whose time has come."
    Everett Dirksen.

  2. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
    Barry Goldwater, accepting the 1964 Republican nomination for President.

  3. "If George McGovern were President of the United States, we wouldn't have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago."
    Abraham Ribikoff, at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

  4. "I'm content to recline and merely contemplate my own former eloquence."
    William F. Buckley, during his 1968 New York mayoral race.