Assassins and Their Victims Trivia Quiz

Answer: Brutus

While Cassius was certainly one of the pack of assassins who killed Caesar on the steps of the Roman Forum, it is Brutus to whom Caesar said, with surprise, "You too, Brutus?" Fearing the extent of Caesar's power, several of the Roman senators, Brutus among them, conspired to kill the Roman dictator on March 15, 44 BC. Narcissus was the man who killed the Emperor Commodus, and Gracchus had been dead about one hundred years by the time Caesar bought the farm.

Answer: Medgar Evers

Following his rejection by the then-segregated University of Mississippi when he applied to enter its law school in 1954, Medgar Evers became the focus for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People's fight to have the university desegregated.

It wasn't until 1962, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the University's non-admission of African-American students to be unconstitutional, that the fight was won. (James Meredith was the first African-American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.) Meantime, Evers had become the first field officer for the NAACP in Mississippi, and it was when he was returning home from a meeting with NAACP lawyers early on the morning of June 12, 1963, that Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his home.

He managed to crawl the 30 feet to the front door before collapsing, and died 50 minutes later in hospital. Byron de la Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council in Jackson, Mississippi, was arrested for the murder, but all-white juries at two trials were deadlocked and de la Beckwith went free.

It wasn't until new evidence emerged in 1994 that he was re-tried. This time he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001. Huey Long, the flamboyant former governor of Louisiana, was killed on September 10, 1935. The supposed assassin, Carl Weiss, was immediately shot and killed by Long's bodyguards. There has been speculation that Weiss only slapped Long, and that Long was actually killed in the hail of bullets fired by the bodyguards. Malcolm X, a disciple of Elijah Muhammed, the founder of the Black Muslims, was shot down as he addressed a gathering in the Audubon Ballroom in New York on February 21, 1965. His chief assassin, Talmadge Hayer, along with two others, was convicted of the murder. There is speculation that the killing was prompted by Malcolm's recantation, following a Haj to Mecca in 1964, of his former hatred of all whites. Where formerly he had preached violence, he had changed his views and saw that peaceful resolution was the path to follow. George Wallace, four time governor of Alabama, was paralyzed in an unsuccessful assassination attempt by Arthur Bremer on May 15, 1972 and spent the rest of his life in a wheel chair. Wallace, who had been an ardent racist, became a born-again Christian in the late '70s, and apologized to leaders of the African-American community for his former remarks, views and actions against them. In his final term as Governor of Alabama he appointed a record number of African-Americans to government positions. He died in 1998.

Answer: Charlotte Corday

Marat suffered from a chronic skin affliction and took frequent baths to alleviate the condition, so Mlle. Corday knew where to find him. Both were Republicans, but Corday was a Girondin while Marat was a member of the more radical Jacobins, a group which despised the more moderate Girondists as weak and ineffectual. Marat helped to launch the Reign of Terror, ordering the execution of not only royalists and aristocrats, but also members of the Girondin faction, and this prompted Corday's determination to put paid to his life.

Her action caused more deaths than it prevented. Jacques-Louis David was a neo-classicist painter who glorified on canvas Napoleon and his exploits. One of David's most famous paintings is that of Corday stabbing Marat while he was in his bath. Marianne, of course, is the symbol of the French revolution - the heroic female figure who strides across many of David's canvasses.

She is the epitome of "Liberte, egalite, fraternite", and she is always depicted wearing the red Phrygian cap. (The Phrygian cap was worn by freed slaves in the Roman Empire, and it was adopted as a symbol of the French Revolution.) Barras was a member of the Directoire and patron of Napoleon in the Little Corporal's rise to fame. Barras also happened to be the lover of Josephine de Beauharnais and he introduced her to that same Little Corporal. We all know what happened next.

Answer: Mohandas Gandhi

Gandhi's determination to send the British, India's colonial rulers, packing brought about India's independence in 1947. Gandhi, who is lovingly called Mahatma ('Great Soul') or Bapu ('Father') by his followers, advocated non-violent resistance to British rule, and became an icon of pacifists everywhere.

His assassination in 1948 by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse sent shock waves around the world and laid the foundation for much of the internecine troubles of that sub-continental country. Nehru was a colleague of Gandhi and succeeded him as leader of the Congress Party.

He died of a heart attack in 1964. Stephen Biko was a non-violent anti-Apartheid activist in South Africa. He was one of the organizers of the Soweto protests, which unfortunately got out of control and devolved into the Soweto Riots. Following the riots, Biko came under even closer police scrutiny, and died in prison in 1977.

The authorities claimed his death was the result of a hunger strike, which doesn't explain the massive head injuries Biko suffered just before his death. Police brutality, anyone? Tom Mboya was a Minister in the government of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first President after independence from Britain. Mboya was poised to become the next President of Kenya when he was gunned down in 1960.

His assassin was executed, but there was widespread belief that the man who pulled the trigger was a catspaw for Kenyatta's powerful relatives and friends, who surmised that Mboya's presidency would put an end to their prestige and power.

Answer: Empress Elisabeth of Austria

Despite having been stabbed on the quayside, Elisabeth, seemingly unaware of the incident, walked up the gangplank and collapsed as she reached the ship's deck. Her last words were, "What happened to me?" Her assassin, a self-proclaimed anarchist, asserted that he wanted to kill a member of royalty and he didn't much care which one! Marie of Romania was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and she died of natural causes in 1938. Ena was another granddaughter of Victoria.

She married King Alfonso XIII of Spain, and in 1931, following the elections that gave rise to the Spanish republic, Alfonso and Ena went into exile.

She died in 1969 (natural causes again). Princess Andrew of Greece was a great-granddaughter of Victoria. She started life as Princess Alice of Battenberg, and assumed the title of Princess Andrew when she married Prince Andrew of Greece, younger brother of King Constantine.

She was the sister of Lord Louis Mountbatten and the mother of Philip Mountbatten, a man who married very well. Princess Andrew moved in with the kids when her health began to fail, and she died at Buckingham Palace in December 1969.

In 1994, her surviving children, Prince Philip and Georg of Hanover, attended a ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, in which Princess Andrew was honoured as 'Righteous among Nations' for sheltering a Jewish family in her Athens home during the Nazi occupation of Greece.

Answer: Gavrilo Princip

Princip was a member of Young Bosnia, a group dedicated to severing Bosnia from the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was recruited, along with several others, by the fanatical Black Hand movement to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he made a state visit to Sarajevo.

It has been suggested that the 19 year old Gavrilo agreed to take part in the plot because he was already dying of tuberculosis and didn't have much to lose. The first attempt was a fiasco, when one of the conspirators was unable to throw his grenade because there was a policeman standing behind him! Moments later, a grenade thrown by another of the conspirators missed the Archduke's car and hit the car behind it, seriously wounding two of the Archduke's aides.

They were taken to hospital and in the ensuing confusion, Gavrilo ducked out of sight and went into a cafe for lunch.

It was while he was eating sandwiches that he saw the Archduke's car coming down the street on its way to the hospital. Gavrilo rushed out of the cafe and fired five shots, point blank, into the car.

The pregnant Archduchess Sophia died instantly, and Franz Ferdinand died a few minutes later.

Answer: Thomas D'Arcy McGee

Thomas D'Arcy McGee was born in Ireland, and his anti-British sentiments were well-documented in his newspaper 'New Era', which he founded in Montreal soon after emigrating to Canada from the U.S. (He had left Ireland as a young man, and had lived in both New York and Boston before moving to Canada.) Later, McGee toned down his Fenian sympathies and denounced the movement when it became too radical for his taste.

He worked instead to achieve Canada's independence from Britain by more peaceful means.

He was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada in 1858, and took part in the Charlottetown meetings that laid the groundwork for the new Dominion of Canada, independent of Britain, thereby becoming one of the Fathers of Confederation.

In 1867, he was elected to the first Canadian Parliament as the Liberal-Conservative (now, there's an oxymoron!) member representing the riding of Montreal West. He was assassinated in Ottawa on April 7, 1868 by Patrick J. Whelan, a Fenian who believed that McGee was a traitor who had abandoned the Fenian cause for personal gain. To date, McGee is the only Canadian federal politician to be the victim of assassination, although attempts were made on the lives of both Mackenzie King and Jean Chretien. Pierre Laporte was a Quebec politician who was murdered at the height of the FLQ crisis in October, 1970, just one day after then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to put down the insurgency.

Answer: Che Guevara

Che Guevara's real name was Ernesto Guevara de la Serna - Che was a nickname (it means 'Dude', evidently). All things being equal, Guevara was a likely candidate for assassination. Born into an upper class Argentinian family, he qualified as a doctor at the University of Buenos Aires.

He was radicalized in his twenties while practising medicine in Guatemala, when Guatemala's socialist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was overthrown in 1954 in a CIA-backed coup. The coup hardened Che's anti-American attitudes and he left Guatemala for Mexico, which is where he met several Cuban exiles, among them the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul. Guevara became an avowed Marxist and he joined Castro's 26th of July Movement, dedicated to the overthrow of Cuban dictator General Fulgencio Batista. Following the rebel victory, Che served in Castro's government as Minister of Industry.

In 1965, he left Cuba and went to Africa, where he joined forces with the Congolese rebels. Later, he showed up in Bolivia, working with Bolivian guerrilla forces.

He was captured by a unit of the CIA-backed Bolivian Army in La Higuera, and was summarily executed by Teran, the soldier who drew the short straw! By the way, note to 'Evita' fans: you need to know that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice took a few liberties with the truth in their libretto, since Che's only contact with Eva Peron was a letter he wrote to her when he was a teenager, asking her for a Jeep. She didn't send him one. Hugo Chavez was the President of Venezuela from 1999 till his death in 2013. He was a socialist and irritated the U.S. government by selling oil cheaply to Cuba. Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator of South America, who fought for the independence of Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama and Bolivia from Spain, survived an assassination attempt in 1828 and died of tuberculosis in 1830. Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose human rights advocacy had caused him to become increasingly a thorn in the side of both the conservative members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the El Salvador government, was shot as he consecrated Eucharist during Mass in March, 1980.

Answer: Yitzhak Rabin

Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995, while attending a rally to celebrate the signing of the Oslo Accords which established the Palestinian Authority. His assassin, Yigal Amir, was a right-wing Israeli activist who obviously felt that the Accords were nothing to celebrate! Rabin was the first of Israel's prime ministers to be born in Israel, and was the only PM to be assassinated and the second PM to die while in office.

His death is seen by many to have stymied the hope for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and while Rabin is very much a hero of the Israeli left, his assassination initiated the rise to power of the Israeli right.

In 1978, Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace agreement with Israeli PM Menachem Begin, which was brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and Egypt became the first Arab state to recognize Israel's right to exist.

This action resulted in the expulsion of Egypt from the Arab League (boy, he should have seen that one coming!), which straightway moved its headquarters from Cairo to Tehran. (Egypt was re-instated in the League in 1989).

A fatwa on Sadat was issued by Omar Abdel-Rahman, a radical Muslim cleric, who was later convicted for his part in the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York. Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981, by a group of Egyptian Army soldiers who were members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization. The assassination took place during a parade which Sadat was reviewing. Olaf (or Olof - spellings differ) was the Prime Minister of Sweden who was gunned down on February 28, 1986 as he and his wife walked home from the movies. Mrs. Palme was treated and survived her wounds, but the Prime Minister was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. The murder remains unsolved. India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi met her end in the garden of her home on October 31, 1984, when she was shot 16 times by two of her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for her decision to send in troops to storm the Golden Temple of Amritsar, Sikhdom's holiest shrine, in order to flush out the Sikh separatists who were using the temple as their headquarters. In hindsight, maybe having Sikh bodyguards probably wasn't a good idea.

Answer: Reinhard Heydrich

The SS, formed by Julius Schreck in 1925, started out as an eight-man bodyguard for Hitler. SS is short for Schutzstaffel which means Defence Squadron. Heydrich, who was one of the principal architects of the Holocaust (I'll bet his mother was proud!), was a rising star in the SS.

He was appointed Reichsprotektor of the Czech states of Bohemia and Moravia, where he soon earned the soubriquet 'the Butcher of Prague'. He developed the arrogant habit of being driven around his domain in an open-top Mercedes, as a way of demonstrating his absolute power over the people under his control, as if defying them to do anything about it.

Heydrich was 39 when he was attacked on May 27, 1942 by a group of British-trained members of the Free Czechoslovak Army (based at the time in Britain). Jan Kubis was the man who hurled the grenade into that open car that resulted in Heydrich's death from septicemia some days later. Kubis and a fellow-conspirator hid out in a church, until one of the conspirators betrayed their whereabouts to the Gestapo (the betrayer was tried and executed by the Czechs in 1947).

Heiden and Hanke were other SS leaders. Heiden faded into obscurity after Himmler succeeded him as head of the SS, and Hanke, who replaced Himmler as head of the SS never learned that he had been awarded that great honour because he was killed by either Czech or Polish partisans in April, 1945.