A presidential quiz.
With the Presidents' Day holiday coming up on Monday, we thought you'd enjoy testing your knowledge of America's chief executives. Which one was born "Leslie Lynch King Jr."? Who lost the race for a Senate seat - but won the White House two years later? And who had a dog named "Sweet Lips"? Look at the photos, read the clues, and consult the list of presidents. The answers are below.
A) He was named Leslie Lynch King Jr. at birth, but his mother changed all three names when she remarried and her new husband adopted her son. He was the only president never to be elected by the people. He spent much of his abbreviated term trying to heal the national wounds of Vietnam and Watergate.
B) He lost his first bid for the presidency by 118,000 votes - less than 0.2 percent of all the votes cast. When he was elected eight years later, he oversaw America's first landing on the moon. The only president to resign his office, historians see him as both a brilliant success - and as a dismal failure.
C) "We hold these truths to be self-evident," he wrote before he became president, "that all men are created equal." He banned the importation of slaves to America starting in 1808. He also introduced the egalitarian French idea of lace-up shoes to Washington society. (Until then, gentlemen's shoes had buckles.)
D) The only president with a PhD, he was president of Princeton before he entered politics. His dream of a League of Nations, a forerunner of the United Nations, was defeated in the US Senate.
E) He and a fellow lawyer held a series of famous debates when the two ran for a Senate seat from Illinois. He lost that election, but won national attention. Two years later, he was elected president. He was the first US president to have received a patent (for a floating drydock).
F) He helped to bring about the end of a 31-year-long state of war that existed between two countries in the Middle East. He was the first candidate from the Deep South to win the presidency since Zachary Taylor in 1848.
G) His initials were the result of a mistake when he entered West Point. But he liked the patriotic "statement" they made, so he kept them. He was one of 10 former generals who became president. (Can you name three others?)
H) He joined the Army at age 13 to fight in the Revolutionary War. Later, he was a savvy general in the War of 1812. He was the first president to ride a railroad train, and his picture is on the $20 bill.
I) His presidential office was in New York City, at that time the nation's capital. He worried about foreign alliances and the growth of the two-party system. He was the only president elected unanimously by the Electoral College. And he had a dog named Sweet Lips.
Extra credit: George W. Bush is our 43rd president, but actually there have only been 42 presidents. How can this be? (Hint: Look carefully at the list of presidents on the facing page.)
Sources: The World Almanac and Book of Facts; White House official website (www.whitehouse.gov); The Detroit Free Press; Infoplease.com; The World Book Encyclopedia; factmonster.com; University of Missouri at Kansas City website (www.umkc.edu).
The names in bold are presidents whose images were used to create the artwork. Dates in parentheses are terms in office.
George Washington (1789-97)
John Adams (1797-1801)
Thomas Jefferson (1801-09)
James Madison (1809-17)
James Monroe (1817-25)
John Quincy Adams (1825-29)
Andrew Jackson (1829-37)
Martin Van Buren (1837-41)
William Henry Harrison (1841)
John Tyler (1841-45)
James K. Polk (1845-49)
Zachary Taylor (1849-50)
Millard Fillmore (1850-53)
Franklin Pierce (1853-57)
James Buchanan (1857-61)
Abraham Lincoln (1861-65)
Andrew Johnson (1865-69)
Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77)
Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-81)
James A. Garfield (1881)
Chester A. Arthur (1881-85)
Grover Cleveland (1885-89)
Benjamin Harrison (1889-93)
Grover Cleveland (1893-97)
William McKinley (1897-1901)
Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09)
William H. Taft (1909-13)
Woodrow Wilson (1913-21)
Warren Harding (1921-23)
Calvin Coolidge (1923-29)
Herbert Hoover (1929-33)
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45)
Harry S. Truman (1945-53)
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61)
John F. Kennedy (1961-63)
Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69)
Richard M. Nixon (1969-74)
Gerald R. Ford (1974-77)
Jimmy Carter (1977-81)
Ronald W. Reagan (1981-89)
George Bush (1989-93)
William J. Clinton (1993-2001)
George W. Bush (2001-present)
(A) Gerald R. Ford. He granted Richard Nixon a full pardon and conditional amnesty to draft evaders who had fled to Canada; (B) Richard M. Nixon, who resigned rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal; (C) Thomas Jefferson. His words are from the Declaration of Independence; (D) Woodrow Wilson. The idea for a League of Nations was born out of World War I; (E) Abraham Lincoln. His Senate rival, Stephen Douglas, a Democrat, lost the presidential election to Lincoln, a Republican, in 1860; (F) Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978; (G) Ulysses S. Grant. Other generals were: Washington, Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Dwight Eisenhower; (H) Andrew Jackson. He is also one of nine presidents who never went to college; (I) George Washington. Washington, D.C., became America's capital in 1800. Extra credit: Grover Cleveland was elected twice, to nonconsecutive terms. So he is counted twice.
An early modern leader
Theodore Roosevelt was not only the first president to ride in an automobile (in 1902), he was also the first former president to fly in a plane (1910). Some of his biggest successes were in environmental protection.
From hot war to cold War
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower commanded all Allied troops in the D-Day invasion of Europe. When "Ike" became president, he faced new battles - from Korea abroad to desegregation at home.
President for a day
March 4, 1849 - the day that new president Zachary Taylor would have taken office - fell on a Sunday. President James Polk left on schedule, but Taylor (being quite religious) did not take the oath of office until the following day. So Missourian David Rich Atchinson, then president pro tempore of the Senate, took over until Taylor was sworn in. In effect, he was president for a day.
