History Quiz

Name:

Please choose the best answer for the following questions.

1) Before becoming governor of California in 1967, Ronald Reagan

a. was a stool pigeon for the FBI and the anti-communist witch-hunters of the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating the film industry.

b. told a major California newspaper: “It’s silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.”

c. made a movie about a college professor trying to teach morality to a chimpanzee.

d. all of the above

2) As governor of California, Ronald Reagan

a. ordered the National Guard to open fire on Free Speech Movement protesters in the People’s Park at University of California-Berkeley in 1969, killing one, blinding another, and wounding sixty others.

b. appointed California National Guard General Louis O. Giuffrida to design Operation Cable Splicer, a three-stage martial law program that developed scenarios for the arrest and long-term detention of anti-Vietnam War activists, political dissidents and “militant negroes [sic]”

c. spoke about the importance of neo-Confederate “state’s rights” to a white audience in Philadelphia, Mississippi (where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964) with Trent Lott.

d. all of the above

3) “October Surprise”

a. was a secret and illicit arrangement engineered by agents of the 1980 Reagan-Bush presidential campaign to delay the release of US hostages in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections, so that Reagan’s opponent, then-President Jimmy Carter, wouldn’t gain a popularity boost.

b. was set-up by campaign manager (later CIA director) William Casey and George H.W. Bush, who met with emissaries from Khomeini’s regime in Madrid and Paris who promised money and arms in return for a prolongation of the hostage crisis.

c. was a secret plan whose details were confirmed by Soviet, Israeli and French intelligence records, as well as the former president of Iran.

d. all of the above

4) The Iran-Contra Affair

a. was a secret operation whereby the Reagan Administration illegally sold arms to Iran, diverted the profits from these sales to support the death squad operations of the contras against the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua in exchange for cocaine that the CIA trafficked to the US.

b. involved many of the 170 high-ranking officials who were indicted or forced to resign because of criminal behavior during the eight years of the Reagan regime.

c. was overseen in part by John Negroponte, then-US ambassador to Honduras, now US “ambassador” to Iraq

d. all of the above

5) During the Reagan regime, the HIV-AIDS crisis in the US reached pandemic levels. President Reagan

a. Was finally shamed into saying the word “AIDS” in public during the summer of 1987.

b. later speculated in his authorized biography that “the Lord brought down this plague” because “illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.”

c. inadvertently helped to launch a new kind of radical gay direct-action militancy in the US thanks to his continued refusal to acknowledge the very existence of this public health emergency.

d. all of the above

6) Which of the following contemporary crises were started by Reagan?

a. the critical mass of neo-conservative right-wing leftovers working for the Bush regime, such as John Poindexter, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams

b. the chemical weapons’ atrocities of Saddam Hussein, which the Reagan Administration aided and abetted with money, materials, intelligence and training

c. the well-armed and well-trained extremist Islamic militants who set up the Taliban and who run al-Qaeda that previously worked for Reagan-Bush’s CIA in Afghanistan

d. all of the above