Presidential Trivia

[gorkay]

Reagan met Nancy Davis, not Jane Wyman, while he was filming "Hellcats of the Navy." Also, I don't know if it's been mentioned (this thread is getting kind of hard to read), but Woodrow Wilson was another President who was elected using his middle name. His full name was Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

Now, don't anyone berate me for not answering a question, because I've lost track of whether or not there's one still out there that wasn't answered correctly. But I will ask one of my own and let the chips fall where they may (this is actually a pretty easy one, but I can't think of another right now):

Who are the three Presidents who won a plurality of the popular vote three times?

[gorkay]

You are correct, sir. Maybe I should have said "at least three" to clarify, but I was thinking of FDR and not Alabama in 1960, which is too iffy. (In case any of you are wondering what we are talking about-- if you give Kennedy only five-elevenths of the Democratic popular vote in Alabama in 1960, to reflect the five out of eleven electoral votes he got in the state due to a divided electoral ticket, his popular-vote total in the election falls below Nixon's.)

[gorkay]

Is the answer to "What do Garfield, Hoover, Truman, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton have in common" that they are/were all left-handed? I know Garfield, Truman, Ford, Bush I and Clinton were.

I've been racking my brain trying to think of good questions... the problem is that I can come up with plenty that would stump the average person, but would be easy for people as knowledgeable as you guys. But let me try a few:

1. Who was the last incumbent President to actively seek his party's nomination for a second term and be denied it?
2. With the exception of Presidents who were assassinated, which one died at the youngest age?
3. Which President is thought by some historians to have been ineligible to serve, because there are doubts as to whether he was really born in this country?

[gorkay]

The answers to my questions: I was thinking of Chester Arthur as the last incumbent to seek and be denied a second term, in 1884. Although Truman's name got on the ballot in some primaries (as did Lyndon Johnson's, for that matter), since he never officially entered the race, I wouldn't consider that to be actively seeking the nomination. Teddy Roosevelt and Hoover, who were also mentioned, weren't incumbents. Polk was the youngest President at death who wasn't assassinated. As for the one who is thought by some not to have been born in the U.S.: I didn't realize that there were three possible answers to this question. I had forgotten about the doubts some have about Van Buren and Arthur. I was thinking of Andrew Jackson. Some historians believe he was actually born either in England or on a ship bound for the U.S., although there is no proof of either claim.

Robert Finch, who was then the Lieutenant Governor of California, was Nixon's first choice for V-P in 1968, but he turned it down. There would have been no constitutional issue, since Nixon was a resident of New York at the time. Here are a couple of other vice-presidential questions: who were the first choices of Hoover in 1928 and Reagan in 1980 for vice-president? (Hint: for Reagan the answer isn't Gerald Ford; there was someone he wanted before that.)