Politics & Power Quote by David Talbot

Talbot’s sentence runs on like a memory you still can’t quite edit down, which is exactly the point: the '60s aren’t presented as a curated era but as a lived acceleration where politics was less “interest” than identity. He frames his coming-of-age as an investment portfolio of belief, and the phrase “hopes and dreams were invested” sneaks in a quiet acknowledgment of risk. You put your future into movements; history can wipe you out overnight.

The list of causes works as moral shorthand - anti-war, civil rights - but it’s also a claim of provenance. For a journalist, origin stories matter. Talbot is telling you his reporting didn’t start from detachment; it started from participation, from the idea that public life could be steered by collective action and charismatic leadership. That’s the baseline against which later cynicism or institutional critique makes sense.

Then the sentence snaps from broad movement history to a single, brutal timestamp: “the night he was killed.” The grammar itself performs trauma: he doesn’t finish the thought with a clean verb, as if language refuses closure. Bobby Kennedy isn’t just a politician here; he’s a container for a generation’s projected repair of America. By placing himself there - teenager, California, campaign worker - Talbot collapses the distance between citizen and event, suggesting that assassination didn’t just alter electoral math; it rewired the emotional contract between young idealists and the state. The subtext: the era taught him both possibility and the cost of believing too much.