Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon Baines Johnson never acted in anything. Every credit gathered on this page is archive footage of a working politician: the 36th president of the United States, in office from 1963 to 1969, appearing as himself in other people's films.

The route there ran through Texas and the Democratic Party. Johnson served in both houses of Congress before becoming John F. Kennedy's vice president in 1961, and he inherited the presidency in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. He left office in 1969 and died in 1973, which means almost the whole of this filmography is posthumous, assembled by people who never met him.

What makes him such a fixture is the breadth of the archive he left and the number of arguments it can be made to serve. The same podium footage turns up in a long-form Vietnam War history, in a documentary about American incarceration, in a portrait of Fred Rogers, in space-programme pictures cut from NASA reels, and in a film about the Beach Boys. Producers of historical series treat him as connective tissue: if a programme covers the 1960s at all, there is a Johnson clip in the bin.

The strange thing about a filmography like this is that he had no say in any of it. Every appearance is an editorial decision made by someone else, decades later, about what his face and his voice should be made to mean. He is one of the few subjects on this site whose screen career is entirely the work of his editors.