[applause] good evening it is a pleasure to welcome you tonight for our program before read get started and want to go over very? housekeeping details please silence your cellphone there is no recording or photos allowed during the program. however you would get a

chance to see because c-span is here. has day "washington post" commentator also the founder of the religious website with that publications with a guide to a ventris entertaining and we will make you a star of the first female network anchor. as a conversation very author of divided lives and a staff writer at "the new yorker" for the washington post as a finalist for the pulitzer prize in the investigative journalist

category. sharing in to pull its surprises the coverage of the of watergate scandal and in 2002 as a reporter for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. he of third norco authored 18 books with the most recent was the last of the president's men. please join me for a warm welcome to our guest to the program. [applause] >> in the spirit of full disclosure we should denounce that you and i are buried.

right before lotus civil war. >> [laughter] but we will talk that i must confess a book that i love with your career or spouse or your child. but i will interrupt. [laughter] >> and i love it if you have

not read it. the looks that your whole life that my childhood experience was magic into the space that i have today. >> i you from the deep south vice spend all of my summers in statesboro and then savannah was scottish presbyterian.

but everyone in the family with the religion or fade which was the occult. and with time travel and a psychic phenomenon so with to use separate religions i believe in god and jesus and i pray every night but also unique set of beliefs that they later came to learn it was just as legitimate as many other religions so i

watched them when somebody in the family dies and then with that plantation and then everybody will lead hour and then there were scratches on the floor. my aunt had a heart condition and had a dream one night about our mother. and said dowry ruby find she said i will leave something as evidence and got up into the parlor there was to brothers shawl that she was buried in.

>> my grandmother her sister my sister pearl . all of our lives. in there has ben the terrible plane crashed in the called the authorities because they were living in fort lauderdale. my aunt's to rebel moro was a they could find them and rescue them. so the is a the stories i had grown up with and then my own experience i had a number of them but i went to smith college i had a

horrible feeling about my mother i knew something terrible is happening there was one phone and i started to call for a my father was a general in the army in fort myers and virginia. we had orderly's always on the house there was no answer. i would not let it go. el levering 60 times and finally somebody answered fairly frantic for christ said what has happened is my mom alrighty and he said no. he said there has been an incident. then somebody else said jesus i will put your mother on the she was crawling.

-- crying but she was in the bathtub but said gi came over and into the house went in to steal some things got scared plotted over head and pushed under the water and was drowning her literally about to drown until the phone started to ring ended not stopped finally he panicked because somebody would answer it so he let her go back and ran out of the house. >> so you'll is were a little magic. >> so this happened so this

has always been part of my life with the magic. it has gotten some attention because i talked about voodoo identify believe it or not it somewhere i decided to put a hex on people i did it three times. i did not know what i was doing i just wanted because they heard leo wanted them to feel uncomfortable. unfortunately they all died. [laughter] everybody always laughs. but just to be clearer it doesn't right away. [laughter]

one of them died one week later and one got fired right away bin died -- then died then shortly after. . . . .