Please silence your cell phones, and if you have or just to let you know, theres no recording, no photos allowed during our programs. And thanks. However, you will get a chance to see all this, because cspan is here tonight taping, so brush your hair, straighten your collars, you may be on tv very soon. [laughter] sally quinn is a longtime Washington Post journalist, columnist, Television Commentator and is one of the cap untils renowned social hostesses. Shes also the founder of on faith from the Washington Post. She writes for various publications and has authored several books including the party a guide to adventurous entertaining, happy endings and were going to make you a star about her experience as the first female Network Anchor in the u. S. Sally is in conversation with two good friends who are also authors, elsa walsh is the author of divided lives the public and private struggles of three women. Shes been a staff writer at the new yorker and a reporter for the Washington Post where she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the Investigative Journalism category. Bob woodward is an associate editor of the Washington Post where hes worked since 1971. He shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first in 1973 for the coverage of the watergate scandal with carl bernstein, and in 2002 as the lead reporter for coverage of the 9 11 terrorist attacks. Hes authored or excuse me. He has authored or coauthored 18 books over the years with his most recent one being the last of the president s men. So please join me in a warm welcome for sally quinn, bob woodward and elsa walsh and enjoy the program. [applause] well, i get to start. I think in the spirit of full disclosure, western announce that you we should announce that you and i are married [laughter] right. And have been married a long time. In fact, sally introduced us. [laughter] it was right before the civil war. [laughter] speak for yourself. Yeah, speak for myself. It was 1981. And it was love at first sight, literally. Love at first sight. Yeah, you witnessed that. I saw it. I saw bob go, ah [laughter] that was a long time ago. You used to describe it as lust at first sight. [laughter] and were going to talk to sally about her book, finding magic, which i must confess, a book i love because its honest, its about the things in life that matter; your career, your spouse, your child in your case or your children, and your friends. So elsas going to lead the questioning, and ill interrupt. Yeah. [laughter] we were debating is that the way it usually goes . Yes, exactly. [laughter] so if he interrupts too many times, im going to tap him over here on the, on the arm. So its an honor to be here to talk to you about this book. I love it too. Thank you. Very fast read for those of you who havent read it. And it looks kind of at your whole life. And i wanted to start with something you wrote in the book that struck me. And you write, my childhood experience with magic planted the seed that grew into the faith i have today. Do you want to talk about that . Well, i am from the deep south, and i was born in savannah, georgia, and spent all of my summers in statesboro which is about 60 miles outside of savannah. And as you know, savannah is midnight in the garden of good and evil, and my parents, my family, they were scottish presbyterians. And my aunt ruth played the organ in the Presbyterian Church on sundays. But everyone in the family, there were eight or nine kids in the family, there was also another religion or faith or set of beliefs, whatever you want to call them, which were the occult. And so my aunt and all of the family believed in the scottish stones and time travel and psychic phenomena and ghosts and astrology and tear row cards and voodoo tarot cards and voodoo. So i had these two separate religions. I mean, i had my little christian religion, and i believed in god and jesus, and i prayed every night. But i also had this other belief, set of beliefs which i later came to learn even when i was finally finishing the book that were just as legitimate as any other religion. Because i think all religion is magic in the end. And so i watched them, i watched all of this happening in a house where there were ghosts. When somebody in the family died, the ghosts would rattle chains up and down. This was a great big, huge, white antebellum southern mansion with a plantation house, and the ghosts would drag chains up and down the hallway of the second floor, and everybody would cower. And then youd go upstairs the next morning, and thered be scratches on the floor. [laughter] and my aunt ruth had a heart condition. She had a dream one night about her mother, and her mother came to her and said, dont worry, youre going to be fine. And she said to her mother, how will i know that youre telling me the truth . And her mother said, well, ill leave something as evidence for you. And she got up the next morning and went into the parlor, and there on the divan was her mothers shawl that she had been buried in. [laughter] now, these are all, this is all family lore. But you believed it. Of course. Yes, okay. Of course. I mean, this is, you know, my aunt maggie so, and they were all psychic. My grandmother, my aunt ruth, my mother, my her sister, my sister, weve all had some psychic ability all of our lives. And my aunt, i mean, i tell the story of my aunt maggie who lived in florida, and she woke up one night to screaming, and she said to her husband, theres been a terrible plane crash in the swamp. They called the authorities they were living in fort lauderdale, and they called the authorities and said theres a plane that went down and we dont know where it is, and my aunt told them where it was, and they were able to rescue some of the people. So this is, so these are stories ive grown up with. And then id had my own i had my own experience. Ive had a number of experiences. But once i went to smith college, and i was in my dormitory one afternoon when i had this horrible feeling about my mother. I just knew something terrible was happening. I ran down the hall, there were no cell phones in those days, and there was one phone. I went to the phone, and i started calling. My father was a general in the army, and he lived we lived at fort myer, virginia. So we had orderlies who were always at the house constantly. And i called, and there was no answer. And i called and i called and i called, and no one answered, no one answered. And i just wouldnt let the phone go. It rang 50, 100 times. And finally somebody answered, and it was one of the orderlies, and i said i was frantic. I said whats happened . Is my mother all right. And he said, well, no, shes not, actually. And i said, well, whats happened . He said, well, theres been an incident. And he then i could hear some other person come in the room, and they said, oh, jesus. He said ill put your mother on. My mother got on, and she was crying so she on the cocouldnt even speak so she couldnt even speak. What had happened was she had been in the bathtub, and a g. I. Who had been living in the barracks had come over and entered the house. I dont know how he got past the orderlies. They must have stepped out. Gone into the bathroom, and he went in to steal some things which he had done several times before from my fathers dresser, saw my mother in the tub, got scared, took his jacket and put it over her head and pushed it under the water and was drowning her. And she was literally about to drown when the phone started ringing. And it rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang, and it didnt stop. And it kept ringing and ringing, and finally he got panicked because he thought somebody would hear it and answer the phone, so he let her go and ran out of the house. And she was able to come up so you were always a believer yeah. Of magic or the mystical. Right, exactly. I mean, so this happened. They found the guy. He was sentenced to seven years, etc. So, i mean, so this has always been part of my life, this magic. And, i mean, the book has gotten some attention because i talked about voodoo, because i learned how to do voodoo in statesboro, georgia, too. And i dont know whether i believed in it or not, but somewhere along the line when i was in my 20s, i decided to put hexes on people, and i did it three times. [laughter] i didnt know what i was doing, and i just wanted them to feel uncomfortable or the pain i felt because they had hurt me or something. Unfortunately, they all died. [laughter] i know, everybody always laughs. [laughter] but just to be clear, they didnt i mean, they didnt die right away. Well, some of them did. [laughter] everyone eventually dies. Well, no, i mean, one of them died a week later, then one of them one of them got fired right away and lost his job and then died. And then the other one died shortly after. But i didnt believe that i was responsible for this, and ben was very funny about it because he thought the whole thing was nonsense and it was completely a joke. But there was this little thing in me that said, god, you know, did i really to this . And my brother, who was who got his ph. D. In religion at the university of chicago and studied under one of the great religion scholars in the country, and he studied mysticism, and then he became a lawyer. And he said you dont want to do this anymore, believe me. You have got to cut this out, because theres this law of threephiladelphia which is whatever of threefold which is whatever bad energy you put out, you get it back threefold. After the third time i got so freaked out that i just stop doing it. That was 35 years ago, and i have never done it again. And ive always been really nice to you. [laughter] i just want to say ben thought it was ridiculous, but whenever he got pissed off at somebody, hed say, go get em, sal. And i just want to say one more thing. That all of my friends are skeptical about this. In fact, nobody believes in this. And i dont either really. But i cant tell you how many skeptical friends i have in the last year who have begged me to put a hex on donald trump. [laughter] im not doing it. [applause] im not swore it off 35 years ago. Not going to happen. You asked me about magic. That was a long answer. So one of the themes in your book is there is a lot of anger at god. And that anger begins at an unusually young age, at the age of 4. And maybe its because your father was in the military, world war ii, south korean war. You saw and had an interaction with a lot of death. And i wonderedded if you could describe why this anger at such a young age and why it made you turn from believing in a god. Well, as i said, my father was in the military. He was in germany during world war ii, and he liberated dachau, and he had a Staff Photographer take photographs of all these piles of dead bodies and emaciated people. He made a scrapbook which is now at the holocaust museum. And hid it. And i found it when i was 4. After hed just come back. And i, i went to him and i said, daddy, whats this . Because we didnt have television in those days, and he explained about the nazis and what theyd done. And i said, daddy, did god know about this . And he said, yes, he did. I said, well, how could he have let this happen . He said, god works in mysterious ways, and we just dont know. I was devastated. I cried all night long because all i could think about were these young, these little jewish children in the camps praying for their safety and protection and their parents praying, and i was praying to the same god, and look what happened to them. And it became clear to me that there was no such thing as god. So i became an atheist at the age of 4, although i didnt know what that meant, and i certainly never told anybody that i didnt believe in god. But i stopped saying my prayers. I learned what the word atheist meant when i was 13. But then my father and i was an atheist when i started the web site 11 years ago at the Washington Post. And i was very angry at god. And then my father was stationed in korea, and i got very sick when he left. They never found out what was wrong with me, and they think it was probably psychosomatic, but i was so terrify my father was going to get killed. I was 10, and he was on the front lines, and he was always in the stars and stripes every day. He was buffalo bill, and the buffaloes were taking on the north koreans. And so i was in tokyo general hospital, and they were bringing in all the Wounded Soldiers from korea, these kids, 17, 18, 19 years old. And they wouldnt allow us to see our parents because they thought it was disruptive because they didnt have enough staff to take care of the kids and deal with the Wounded Soldiers. Take them somewhere to the back of the plane but one of the most dramatic experiences that i have been through so it wasnt until jon meacham who was editor of newsweek and the various wellknown Pulitzer Prizewinning writer and also a scholar ended deeply profoundly Christian Person and we have this lunch before he started the web site. They said you are not an atheist and i said yes i am and said no you were not because atheists is too negative of the word and you are not a negative person. It means that you deny the existence of god and you cant deny the existence because you dont know. The word agnostic has never meant anything to me because i think it means we dont know and where all agnostic. He doesnt know any more than i do and my favorite Bumper Sticker is you dont know when i dont either and i think thats true. But john did say to me look if you are going to be an atheist you need to go out and learn something about religion because you know nothing about religion. Which i did and i read them and something was percolating inside me. He did say to me also how can you be angry at god if you dont believe in god and i thought oh an interesting question. Then i had this idea to start a web site. Lets stop here for a moment. You started the web site at around the same time that your husband ben bradlee, the great editor of the Washington Post, someone we all of you, began to fail and you did what many journalists often do. You made a journalistic exploration of something that was maybe more personal than you ever really were willing to admit. Lets talk about that but lets talk a little bit more about this first. I will just say that ben developed dementia and died in Something Like three years but he had been diagnosed eight years before eight, nine, 10, 11. It was the year that he was diagnosed that i started the web site and i had all of this right reading that ive been doing and i thought we werent covering religion because i thought it was such an important story from not only a political point of view but also Foreign Policy. I went to don graham and suggested i do a religion web site. He said why not you start a religion web site. This was in the dark ages when you could do anything on the web web. It wasnt anywhere near the post and i said i dont know anything about the internet and i dont know anything about religion and he said well nobodys perfect. [laughter] i got jon meacham to be my comoderator and shortly after that i started a trip around the world and one of the things that john and i, i wanted to do a panel so i knew for religious people. One of them was martin marty who was a teacher of my brothers, that dean at the university of chicago and i knew Karen Armstrong who was a scholar and Elaine Pagels and desmond tutu. I called them up and they said would you be on a panel. Nobody would turn it down. That your friend then didnt understand what your inch or so was. Been really couldnt understand. He was appalled. Nobody understood how it was that i could start a religion web site and shortly after that i took a trip around the world. It was a three week trip and we went to 13 countries. It was really important for me to do that because i saw it firsthand all of these different religions and all of these different things. What was obviously the viewpoint percolating in me was the beginning spirituality that was coming. I was looking for meaning to my life and i havent articulated it. I had read victor frankels book a mans search for which is one of your favorite books and that had a powerful impact on me particularly with my history with the nazis in the holocaust. But it just seemed to me that i was turning my wheels. I thought i got so involved in religion and then became more involved in spirituality and i began to feel more that i was looking for something more than than and i stopped calling myself an atheist at some point but i still wouldnt know what to call myself. I was yearning for something. The old cliche man and woman comes to god. , that . Its a known and you lay it out in the book the relationship you had with ben and the love for both of your lives and it went on and on and on for decades. Is there some kind of okay im going to. Thats a great question bob. We would like you to lie down on the couch. I didnt think of it that way. The odd thing was once that ben was diagnosed we never discussed it again and i kept looking at all these tv ads where the older couple goes into the doctor and 11 of them gets diagnosed and they hold hands and they start making plans for the future and all that. That didnt happen with us. He was the master of denial. He was the king of denial so we just didnt talk about it and we just went on as though nothing had happened. I could see that i was losing him and i needed something to fill that void. And i wouldnt call myself a seeker but i did have these moments of transcendence and i started a video interview thing called divine impulse and i interviewed people and i always ask them at the end what gives your life meaning . What is a sense of the divine . I dont know where i came up with that because its not anything i ever asked myself and in fact one night he was sitting with barry miller added dinner party and he turned to me and said do you have faith . My web site was called on faith and i didnt know how to answer because i hadnt thought about it myself. I really did have to start thinking about it and there were moments in my life when i just knew that something, there were something bigger than i was. I didnt believe in god but i did leave in a creator. I couldnt get my mind around the idea that of that first there was nothing and then there was something. And so i began to accept that there was something bigger than i was. As ben began failing i began to spend more time with them and the last two years of his life i literally became his caretaker. I never hired a caretaker. We had a house