I’m a political scientist. Here’s what Robert Redford taught me about politics.

Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman Professor in Presidential Studies at UVA’s Miller Center and a life-long film buff and political aficionado, ever since her mother took her to a JFK campaign rally.

OK, I’ll admit it. Robert Redford made my teenaged heart go pitter-patter when I saw him in my first “grown-up” films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Way We Were. And I’ll confess that my more mature cardiac rhythms still flutter at the sight of his bright smile and blonde All-American looks on the big screen or my TV. “In a way, he was like the country he lived in . . . .” Thus began his character Hubbell Gardner’s short story in The Way We Were. Indeed, Redford’s own complex persona reflected the United States’ conflicting trait of heroism leavened by cynicism.

As I moved into my twenties and majored in political science, I was drawn to The Candidate and All the President’s Men. In the former, Redford portrays Bill McKay, the estranged son of a former California governor, played by famed character actor Melvyn Douglas, the husband of Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom Richard Nixon savaged in their 1952 Senate race. Consultants persuade young McKay to run for the U.S. Senate, but his idealism conflicts with their Machiavellian tactics. As he tries to proclaim their soundbites in a TV ad, he succumbs to a fit of giggles, and I dare any viewer to stifle their own laughter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9j_PJaXqcA). Enervated by the constant struggle to present himself inauthentically, the candidate has a brief mental break and begins to recite a satirical soliloquy in the campaign car’s back seat: “This country can’t any longer play off black against old, white against young. This country cannot house our houseless, feed our foodless, boing, boing. So vote once, vote tuh-wice for Bill McKay . . . .”

Miraculously, he defeats the gray-haired incumbent and then famously ends the film with a query to the McKay campaign’s manager, “What do we do now?” Yet the cynical core of The Candidate didn’t dissuade me from volunteering in local, congressional, and presidential campaigns or serving internships at the Louisville Planning Commission, for my Kentucky senator, and at the U.S. Department of Justice. My only regret was missing Redford testifying on the Hill for environmental causes during the summer of my Senate internship. Obviously, he believed in the system even while satirizing it on film, and I chose to follow that idealism.

That same year, 1976, Hollywood released All the President’s Men, with Redford playing Bob Woodward to Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein. Coming of age during the constitutional crisis of Watergate only strengthened my belief in our Founders’ establishment of checks and balances on our three branches of government  and the First Amendment’s protection of a free press to check the government. The summer of 1973, while my friends were relaxing around pools or on tennis courts, I was glued to the family TV watching every fascinating minute of the Senate Watergate hearings.

Three years later, fellow interns and I toured the Washington Post’s newsroom, where we saw the real Bernstein and Post editor, Ben Bradlee, my new idols, thanks to Redford’s insistence on authentic portrayals of them in the film adaptation of “Woodstein’s” book.

Starting in 1980, as a student at Oxford, I make it a habit to watch All the President’s Men on election night instead of voting returns because I know in the film good always triumphs over evil, as it did in the Watergate saga.

Fast forward to 2012 and my collaboration with former Virginia Governor Gerald Baliles, then director of UVA’s Miller Center, to bring Woodward and Bernstein to Charlottesville for its annual film festival. Marking the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, we screened All the President’s Men for some 1,100 guests at the restored Paramount Theater. As the film ended with the teletype machine announcing Nixon’s August 9, 1974 resignation, the lights went up and out walked my journalistic heroes to discuss their role in the 37th president’s historic exit from the White House. To this day, they praise Redford’s crucial contribution to their partnership, from the moment he purchased the rights to their story.

My sadness at Redford’s passing not only results from the loss of my favorite actor of his generation and my teenage heartthrob, but his staunch support for our constitutional system in this fraught political era.