Good evening, everyone. Before we get started, e wanted to go over a couple of very quick housekeeping details. 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 of this, because cspan is here tonight taping. So brush your hair, straighten your collars [laughter] you may be on tv very soon. Sally quinn is a longtime Washington Post journalist, columnist, Television Commentator and one of the capitols renowned social hostesses, also the founder of the religious web site on faith for the Washington Post. She writes for various publications and has in order several books including the party, 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 tonight 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; paris, 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 coauthor 18 books over the year with his most recent one being the last of the president s men. So please join me in welcoming sally, elsa and bob, and enjoy the program. [applause] well, i get to start. I think in the spirit of full disclosure, we should announce that you and i are married right. [laughter] 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. [laughter] 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. And so elsas going to lead the questioning, and ill interrupt. [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 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 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 to 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 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 phenomenon and ghosts and astrology and tear row cards and tarot cards and voodoo. So i had these two separate religions. I had my christian religion, and i believed in god and jesus and i prayed every night, but i also had other 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 ghost would rattle chains up and down this was a great, big, huge southern mansion with a plantation host, and the ghost would drag chains up and down the second floor hallway, and even was cower. And youd go upstairs the next morning, and thered be scratches on the floor. And my aunt ruth had a heart condition. She had a dream one might about her mother, and her mother said to her, 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 more you. And she got up the next morning and and went into the parlor, and there on the divan was her mothers shawl that she had been buried in. If now, this is all family lore. But, i mean you believed it. Of course. Yes, okay. [laughter] i mean, this is, you know, my aunt maggie 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, they tell the story of my aunt maggie who loved 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. And they called the authorities. They were live anything fort lauderdale. They called the authorities, and they said theres a plane thats gone down, and we dont know where it is. My aunt tell them where it was, and they went and found them, and they were able to rescue some of the people. So this is these are stories ive grown up with. And then id 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 rap down the i ran down the hall, and i went to the phone and started calling. My father was a general in the army, and we lived at fort myer, virginia. And 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. 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. 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, you know . He said, ill put your mother on. My mother got on, and she was e croixing so she couldnt even speak she was crying so she couldnt can even speak. She had been in the bathtub, and the tub was running, and a g. I. Who had been living in the barracks had come to over and entered the house. And i dont know how he got past the orderlies. They might have, must have stepped out. Gone into the bathroom, 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 her under the water and was drowning her. And she was literally about to drown, but the phone started ringing. And it rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang, and it kept ringing and ringing, and finally he got panicked because he thought somebody would hear it and get my mother. So he let her go and ran out of the house. And she was able to come up finish. So you were always a believer yeah. Of magic or the mystical right, exactly. I mean, so this happened. It was, they found the guy. He was sentenced to seven years, etc. So, i mean, 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. I dont know whether i believe 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 didnt know how to do it, and i just wanted them because they had hurt me or somebody i cared about, and i just wanted them to feel the pain i felt. 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, one of them died 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 k and ben was very funny about it because he kept saying 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 do this . And my brother, who was, who got his ph. D. In religion at the university of chicago, he was one of the great religion scholars in the country, and he studied mysticism and became a lawyer, and he said you dont want to do this anymore, believe me. Youve got to cut this out. Because theres this law of threefold which is whatever bad energy you put out, you get it back threefold. And after the third time, i got so freaked out by it that i just stopped doing it. That was 35 years ago. And i have never done it again, ever. Ive always been really nice to you. [laughter] but i just want to say ben thought it was ridiculous, but whenever he got pissed off at somebody, hed say, go get em, sal. [laughter] all of my friends are skeptical about this. In fact, nobody believes in this. And i dont east really. Either really. I cant tell you how many skeptical friends ive had in the past year who have begged me to put a hex on donald trump. [laughter] im not doing it. [applause] swore it off 35 years ago, aint gone that happen. [laughter] 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 and i wondered 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 his 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 went to him and i said, daddy, whats this . 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 . And he said, god works mys tier yous ways mysterious ways. 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 terrified my father was going to get killed. I was 10, and he was on the front lines, and he was always on the front page of the stars and stripes every day. The buffalo. Buffalo bill. I was in tokyo General Hospital, and they were bringing in all the wounded soldiers, these kids, 17, 18, 19 years old. And they also would not allow me to see 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. So i saw these wounded soldiers, and i didnt get better. So they transferred me back to brook General Hospital in san antonio, and we didnt know this, but they put me and my mother and my sister and my little brother on a hospital plane full of wound soldiers. There were no seats. There were three rows of litters five high, and all of these severely, the most severely wounded soldiers. So a lot of them had lost limb, a lot of them were badly burned. And they were all, they were dying. And they were bleeding, and my mother would go up and down the aisles, and they were calling for their mothers and crying and begging to die or not to die, and the blood was everywhere, and it was and i kept thinking how could there be a god . How could any god allow to happen . And, you know, these guys would die, and theyd come and zip them up in a bag and take them, i dont know, somewhere in the back of the plane. It was probably one of the most traumatic experiences ive ever been through. And so it wasnt until i john meacham, who was editor of newsweek and whos a very well known Pulitzer Prizewinning writer, and hes also a religion scholar and a deeply, profoundly christian person, we had this lunch. This was before i started the web site. And he said, youre not an atheist. And i said, yes, i am. He said, no, youre not, because an atheist is too negative of a word, and youre not a negative person. It means that you deny the existence of god, and you cant deny the existence of god because you dont know. And the word with agnostic has never meant anything to me because i think it means we dont know, and i think were all agnostics. I think the pope is an agnostic because he doesnt know any more than i do. My favorite Bumper Sticker is i dont know and you dont either. [laughter] and i think thats true. But john did say to me, look, if youre going to be an atheist, then you need the go out and learn something about religion because you know nothing about religion. He gave me a list of books to read, which i did. I reed them, and something was i read them, and something was percolating. He did say how can you be angry at god if you dont believe in god . And i thought, oh, thats an interesting question. [laughter] i did. And then i had this idea to start the web site well, lets stop here yeah, okay. For to a moment. You started the web site at around the same time that your husband, ben bradley the great editor of the Washington Post, someone we all love began to fail. And you did what many journalists often do, you began sort of a journalistic exploration of something that was maybe more personal than you ever really were willing to admit. Right. Lets talk about that, but lets talk a little bit more about ben first. Okay. Okay, well finish. No, you ill just say that ben developed dementia. Ben died itll be three years week after next, but he had been diagnosed eight years before that. Well, i had never actually put that together, elsa, but it was the year that he was diagnosed that i started the religion web site. And i had all of this reading that id been doing. I thought that we werent covering religion because i thought it was such an important story from not only a political point of view, but also a Foreign Policy and that the post just wasnt covering it. And i went to don graham and suggested this, i do a religion web site. I suggestedded that we, the paper, should cover religion. He said, well, why dont you start a religion web site. This was in the dark ages when you could do anything on the web. The web site was in arlington, it wasnt anywhere near the post. I said i dont know anything about internet, i dont know anything about religion, and he said, well, nobodys perfect. [laughter] and so i got john meacham to be my comoderator. And i then, shortly after that, started a trip around world. And one of the things that john and i, i wanted to do a panel. And so i knew four religious people, one of them was martin marty who also was a teacher of my brothers, a dean of religion at university of chicago. And i knew Karen Armstrong who is a religion scholar and e [inaudible] and Archbishop Desmond tu tu, so i called them up and said would you be on the panel, and after that i was golden because nobody would turn it down. But your friends didnt really understand your friends, nor ben really understood what your interest ben was absolutely appalled. He could not believe, in fact, nobody could. In fact, they still cant. [laughter] i mean, still nobody can understand how it was that i could start a religion web site. And shortly after that i took a trip around the world to study the great faiths, and it was a three week trip, and we went to about 13 countries. And i saw, i mean, it was really important for me to do that because i saw firsthand all of these different religions and all these different faiths. And what was obviously, as you point out, percolating in me was this, my sort of beginning spirituality that was coming. I was looking for meaning in my life, and i didnt, i hadnt articulated it. I had read victor frankels book, a mans search for meaning, which is one of your favorite books. Right. And that had had a powerful impact on me particularly because of my history with the nazis and the holocaust with my father. But it just seemed to me that i was turning my wheels, you know . I was writing a little bit for the post and doing a little bit of that and everything, but i got so involved in religion. And then became more involve in spirituality. And i began to feel more that i was looking for something more than and i stopped calling myself an atheist at some point. But i still didnt know what to call but there was some yearning yes, i was yearning for and what, i mean, theres the old cliche man, woman comes to god in weariness. Was there some of that in the sense because no, it was i mean, its known, but and you lay it out in the book, the relationship you had with ben. I mean, that was the love of both of your lives. Right. And went on and on and on for decades. And as he drifted away, is there some kind of, okay, im going