The Kennedy Family
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50 free The Kennedy Family trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Few families have shaped American public life like the Kennedys. In three generations they produced a president, senators, diplomats and activists, built one of the country's great fortunes, and endured a run of losses so public that people still speak of a family curse. This quiz covers the whole clan, not just Jack: Joe and Rose and their nine children, the wartime heroics, the 1960 campaign and the White House years, Bobby and Ted's careers, Jackie's life before and after, and the cousins, in-laws and grandchildren who kept the name in the headlines. It starts with the stories most people half-remember and builds to difficult questions for readers of Kennedy biographies. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will pick up something new even on the ones you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01After his patrol boat was sunk in 1943, John F. Kennedy scratched a rescue message onto what?
A coconut shell
A coconut shell carried his plea for help, and all eleven survivors of PT-109 were rescued. He later kept it as a paperweight on his Oval Office desk.
Q 02Which operation, arranged by her father in 1941, left Rosemary Kennedy permanently incapacitated?
A lobotomy
A lobotomy at 23 left Rosemary unable to walk or speak intelligibly. From 1949 she lived at a care institution in Wisconsin, at first isolated from her siblings.
Q 03Which sporting movement grew out of a summer camp Eunice Kennedy Shriver ran at her Maryland farm?
Special Olympics
Special Olympics held its first international games at Chicago's Soldier Field in 1968, drawing 1,000 athletes with intellectual disabilities from 26 states and Canada.
Q 04Which bodybuilder turned film star did Maria Shriver, a niece of John F. Kennedy, marry in 1986?
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger, later a Republican governor, married into America's best-known Democratic dynasty. The couple had four children and divorced in 2021.
Q 05Which Soviet leader gave the Kennedy family Pushinka, a puppy whose mother had flown in space?
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev sent the puppy after Jacqueline Kennedy asked him about the space dog Strelka at a dinner in Vienna. Pushinka later had four pups the president called pupniks.
Q 06Which film star sang "Happy Birthday" to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in May 1962?
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe wore a sheer dress sewn with 2,500 rhinestones, so tight she had difficulty putting it on. The gala came ten days before his actual 45th birthday.
Q 07Ted Kennedy drove off a narrow bridge on which Massachusetts island in July 1969, killing his passenger?
Chappaquiddick
Chappaquiddick shadowed the rest of his career: he pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the accident and received a two-month suspended jail sentence.
Q 08Which Greek shipping magnate did Jacqueline Kennedy marry in October 1968, five years after Dallas?
Aristotle Onassis
Aristotle Onassis married her on Skorpios, his private island in the Ionian Sea. The match sharply dented her popularity with an American public that saw it as a betrayal.
Q 09Which title did People magazine give John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1988, while he was studying law?
Sexiest Man Alive
Sexiest Man Alive went to the late president's son before he had finished law school. He then failed the bar exam twice, passing on his third attempt in July 1990.
Q 10Which Lerner and Loewe musical gave the Kennedy White House years their lasting nickname?
Camelot
Camelot was the comparison Jacqueline Kennedy drew in a Life magazine interview a week after Dallas, saying her husband liked to play the cast recording before bed.
Q 11In which Cape Cod village does the Kennedy Compound, the family's waterfront summer home, stand?
Hyannis Port
Hyannis Port became the family base in 1926, when Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. rented a summer cottage there. He bought it two years later and enlarged it for his growing family.
Q 12Which sitting vice president did John F. Kennedy narrowly defeat in the 1960 presidential election?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon began the autumn campaign six points ahead in the polls, then perspired under harsh studio lighting in the first televised presidential debate.
Q 13Which Cabinet post did Robert F. Kennedy hold in his brother John's administration from 1961?
Attorney General
Q 21To which country did Franklin D. Roosevelt send Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. as US ambassador in 1938?
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom posting ended badly: he resigned in late 1940 after a controversy over his public suggestion that democracy there was finished.
Q 22Which singer serenaded Caroline Kennedy at her 50th birthday with a 1969 hit he said she inspired?
Neil Diamond
Neil Diamond said in 2007 that a magazine photo of the young Caroline on a horse inspired Sweet Caroline, though he later said the song was really about his then-wife.
Q 23To which country did Barack Obama send Caroline Kennedy in 2013 as the first woman US ambassador there?
Japan
Attorney General at just 35, he was one of the youngest Cabinet members in American history, and he had run his brother's presidential campaign the year before.
Q 14In which city was Robert F. Kennedy shot in a hotel kitchen, hours after winning the California primary?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles busboy Juan Romero, 17, was shaking Kennedy's hand in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen when the shots came. He cradled the senator's head and placed a rosary in his hand.
Q 15Which volunteer agency, founded in 1961, had Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver as its first director?
Peace Corps
The Peace Corps began in March 1961, and Shriver ran it for five years. He went on to found Head Start and other programs as architect of the War on Poverty.
Q 16Which book about eight US senators won John F. Kennedy a Pulitzer Prize in 1957?
Profiles in Courage
Profiles in Courage won the biography prize although the jury had not shortlisted it. Speechwriter Ted Sorensen later acknowledged drafting most of its chapters.
Q 17John F. Kennedy's 1960 victory made him the first US president of which religious faith?
Catholic
Catholic faith was a live campaign issue, so he went to Houston to assure an association of Protestant ministers that his church would not shape his decisions.
Q 18From which university did Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and all four of his sons graduate?
Harvard
Harvard gave the family its degrees but not always its welcome: as a student, Joseph Sr. joined the Hasty Pudding Club but was not invited into the elite Porcellian Club.
Q 19Which US coin first carried John F. Kennedy's portrait in 1964, replacing Benjamin Franklin's?
Half dollar
The half dollar was authorized by Congress just over a month after his death, and the first silver coins were hoarded as mementos as soon as they were released.
Q 20Which political magazine did John F. Kennedy Jr. launch in 1995, with Cindy Crawford on its first cover?
George
George put Cindy Crawford on its debut cover dressed as the first US president, and sold politics as lifestyle until it closed in 2001.
Japan was her post until January 2017, and she returned to diplomacy as ambassador to Australia from 2022 to 2024.
Q 24Which sitting president did Ted Kennedy challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter won enough delegates to clinch it, yet Kennedy carried his insurgent campaign on to the party convention that August, hoping to free delegates from the primary results.
Q 25Who was convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy in 1968?
Sirhan Sirhan
Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death in 1969, but the sentence was commuted to life in 1972. Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson helped wrestle him to the ground.
Q 26Which game did the Kennedy family famously play on the lawns of their Cape Cod compound?
Touch football
Touch football suited a family of athletes: Robert played end for his college team and scored a touchdown in his senior year before breaking his leg in practice.
Q 27Which actress earned an Oscar nomination for playing Jacqueline Kennedy in the 2016 film Jackie?
Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman took a role first announced for Rachel Weisz in 2010, when Darren Aronofsky was set to direct. Both left the project after their relationship ended.
Q 28How did Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the eldest brother, die on a secret mission in August 1944?
His bomber exploded in flight
His bomber exploded in flight when its load of explosive detonated prematurely. He had completed 25 combat missions and could have gone home, but volunteered.
Q 29Which nickname did Ted Kennedy earn while representing Massachusetts in Congress from 1962 to 2009?
Lion of the Senate
Lion of the Senate fitted his record: Kennedy and his staff wrote more than 300 bills that were enacted into law.
Q 30Which state elected Robert F. Kennedy to the US Senate in 1964, despite jibes that he was a carpetbagger?
New York
New York voters chose him over Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating, even though he did not live in the state and was not registered to vote there.