14 Biopics About US Presidents, Ranked By Accuracy

What It Got Wrong: In Thirteen Days, Kevin Costner plays Kenneth O’Donnell, who was based on John F. Kennedy’s real-life consultant and special assistant and appointments secretary, and before that held long-standing ties to the Kennedy political dynasty. In the movie, though, he’s really a composite character based on several people. When told that Costner’s character is the lead, JFK's Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara initially refused to see the movie, claiming that O’Donnell had no impact on the Cuban Missile Crisis whatsoever. 

What It Got Right: While it certainly didn’t get everything right, it did get a lot right. Much of the dialogue was taken directly from White House transcripts. Moreover, the film gets the broad-strokes of the Cuban Missile Crisis correct, including many details about which advisors have certain advice, the range and lethality of the Soviet missiles, and most importantly, how close the world really came to nuclear war. Even McNamara eventually came around and gave the movie credit for doing so. 

What It Got Wrong: The film’s own Content Consultant Harold Holzer freely admits that Lincoln is full of anachronisms, inaccuracies, and wholesale inventions. In descending order of significance: the opening scene with two Union soldiers, one white and one Black, reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg address back to him almost certainly didn’t happen, because the speech didn’t become widely known to the public until the 20th century (Lincoln also didn't have it memorized when he delivered it originally); Mary Todd Lincoln wasn’t present to watch the tallying of votes for the 13th Amendmen (and Congressmen didn't yell at each other); Lincoln never had a portrait of America’s shortest-tenured President William Henry Harrison in his office (it was likely put in to symbolize Lincoln’s impending death); flag-raising ceremonies used a series of ropes and not pulleys; and so on. In other words, the filmmakers knew about these errors and included them anyway. In defense of them, Holzer quotes director Steven Spielberg, who said about the movie that it’s both a “fantasy” and a “dream,” and that “one of the jobs of art is to go to the impossible places that history must avoid.”

What It Got Right: After the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, the film shows Pennsylvania Congressman and Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Thaddeus Stevens, who was instrumental in its passage, returning home and delivering the good news to his housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith, who is  Black and appears to be his lover. That might seem like a dramatic invention, but Smith was a real person and Stevens’s common-law wife, which was essentially an open secret at the time. 

What It Got Wrong: As of June 2024, The Apprentice had not yet received a US theatrical release, but after the biopic made the rounds on the film festival circuit, the Trump campaign issued a blanket condemnation of the film as “blatantly false,” and threatened to sue. In response, director Ali Abbasi offered to screen the film for Trump personally and discuss it with him, and also noted the ex-president’s not-so-stellar record with lawsuits. 

What It Got Right: Whether this belongs in the “right” or “wrong” category really depends on your political point of view - notice how the biopics about very recent presidents are also the most controversial? - but here are the facts. While depicting Donald Trump’s rise from real-estate nepo baby to fraudulently successful real-estate mogul, it includes a 1989 incident in which Trump sexually assaults his then-wife Ivana. Ivana later testified that this happened in her divorce deposition, but recanted this accusation in 2015, after Trump announced a bid for the presidency. (This scene prompted drama with the film's financier, Kinematics, who ultimately dropped out.) Another disputed sequence is the scenes showing Trump getting liposuction and scalp treatment for his baldness, which Ivana said happened but Trump denies. 

What It Got Wrong: The 2000 made-for-TV movie has some inaccuracies. Two include: it states that George Washington’s forces suffered no casualties at the Battle of Trenton, when in reality they suffered six; and a scene in which General Washington pulls a gun on a skeptical subordinate officer, Horatio Gates, and forces him to be removed from their camp.

What It Got Right: Despite those changes to the real story, the film won a Peabody Award for Excellence. One highlight is its handling of the story of Alexander Hamilton, who really did raise his own company as a 21-year-old and served under Washington’s command with distinction as an artillery officer, establishing a political relationship that would last for decades. 

What It Got Wrong: Like many of the other movie depictions of Lyndon Baines Johnson, which go all the way back to 1978 TV movie King, LBJ - directed by Rob Reiner, starring Woody Harrelson, and released in 2017 - paints Johnson as a mostly good-hearted liberal who helped pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and who was manipulated into escalating the Vietnam War. In reality, while LBJ was an ally to the Civil Rights movement, he also authorized J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. There’s also strong evidence that LBJ willingly expanded the war to appear strong on national defense, even though advisors of many political varieties urged him to make a negotiated settlement. But LBJ avoids the wiretapping and doesn't delve into Vietnam at all. 

What It Got Right: The film largely portrays the transfer of the presidency to LBJ after JKF’s assassination as intense as it really was. It also nails the negative reaction First Lady Lady Bird Johnson received in the south after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Lastly, its depiction of Bobby Kennedy as a “rich, entitled bully” is apparently accurate. 

What It Got Wrong: Frost/Nixon is set up as a one-on-one verbal sparring match between a TV journalist and a master manipulator of an ex-president, which makes for good drama, but not an accurate representation of the facts. The biggest inaccuracy, and biggest misrepresentation, is the film’s climax, when Frost supposedly gets Nixon to confess to his involvement in the Watergate burglaries. In the movie, Nixon admits that he “was involved in a legal cover-up, as you call it.” In reality, Nixon said the exact opposite: “You’re wanting me to say that I participated in an illegal cover-up. No!” At most, the real Nixon admitted to Frost to making “mistakes” during and after the burglaries, but not to doing anything illegal, aka the classic presidential defense. 

There’s also the sequence when Frost’s researcher James Reston makes a “shocking discovery” of an incriminating taped conversation between Nixon and adviser Charles Colson. While this recording does exist, the Watergate prosecutors opted not to use it because it was unnecessary. So, Reston wouldn’t have known about it. Finally, Nixon’s drunken late night phone call to Frost in which he threatens to destroy him just completely didn’t happen. 

What It Got Right: The film is broadly correct that, in 1977, British TV presenter David Frost did convince former president Richard Nixon to participate in a series of interviews about his presidency, including a discussion of the Watergate break-in. The film is also honest about the fact that Nixon was paid $600,000 for them, but does omit that he received an additional 20% of the profits. In other words, Nixon had a big incentive to help provide captivating television.