History Was Made to Be Rewritten

From GWTW to Argo to Hamilton, fact is often secondary to fiction.

Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton (Photo: Disney Plus)

If actors can talk politics, there’s no reason politicians can’t weigh in on films. Right? Some might even offer insight deeper than calling Meryl Streep “overrated,” as Donald Trump did several years back. Take former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who, in a 2012 interview with Piers Morgan, dropped some juicy inside info about the movie Argo.

First off, he loved it and despite controversy over its inaccuracies, he was rooting for it to win “Best Film” at the Oscars, which happened several days after the interview. (It did end up winning Best Picture.) Still, he wanted to clarify something: Canada deserved far more credit (90 percent) than the movie gave it, as did a man named Ken Taylor, a Canadian ambassador whom the President called the “main hero” and lauded for having “orchestrated the entire process” in which six U.S. diplomats were rescued from Tehran, Iran, during the early days of the 1979–81 Iran hostage crisis.

So where did that leave CIA agent Tony Mendez, the central character played by Ben Affleck? According to President Carter, whose term in office was largely defined by the crisis, Mendez was in Tehran for only one and a half days.