Lally Weymouth, a globe-trotting journalist and socialite who belonged to the Graham family that owned The Washington Post for 80 years, and who carved her own niche securing hard-to-land interviews with foreign leaders, including Saddam Hussein, Yasir Arafat and Muammar el-Qaddafi, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 82.
Her daughter Katharine Weymouth said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Ms. Weymouth was the granddaughter, daughter, sister and mother of publishers of The Post. But she was never given a leadership role at the paper, which by some accounts she desired, in part because women of her generation were not put on a track for such jobs.
Ms. Weymouth’s maternal grandfather, the banker and financier Eugene Meyer, bought The Post out of bankruptcy in 1933. He named his son-in-law, Philip L. Graham, publisher in 1946. After Mr. Graham’s death by suicide in 1963, leadership passed to his widow, Katharine Graham, who overcame her inner fears and lack of preparation to preside steadfastly over the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.
Although Ms. Weymouth was the oldest of four children — and the only daughter — Mrs. Graham anointed her oldest son, Donald, as her successor in the early 1970s. Said to be wary of family competition, Mrs. Graham wanted just one of her children involved in running the paper, Roswell L. Gilpatric, a Graham family lawyer, told the author Carol Felsenthal for an unauthorized 1993 biography of Mrs. Graham, “Power, Privilege and The Post.”
Ms. Weymouth resented being left out, Edward Kosner, a former editor of New York magazine, where she was a contributor, said in an interview. On the other hand, she was motivated to carve out a career on her own. “I think her family situation drove her ambition,” Mr. Kosner added.
In a 2011 interview with Washingtonian magazine, Ms. Weymouth said she never aspired to run The Post. “Mom decided on one child — Don,” she said. “I didn’t want to go to The Post. I wanted to make it on my own.”
In addition to New York, she worked as a freelance writer for Esquire and other publications in the 1970s. She contributed foreign reporting, especially about the Middle East, to The Los Angeles Times from 1983 to 1986. In 1986, Newsweek, which the Graham family also owned, asked her to specialize in interviewing foreign leaders for the newsmagazine, where her title was diplomatic correspondent.
For Newsweek, Ms. Weymouth often published Q&A-style interviews with major world leaders. The prospect of their words being printed largely unencumbered by analysis and then read by America’s political elite certainly helped her land the big gets, among them President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and dictators like Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. But Ms. Weymouth was known to be a dogged interlocutor.
For Newsweek in 2006, she grilled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran about whether he stood by a comment he had made earlier that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” The Iranian president kept dodging the question, finally blurting: “Are you asking me yes or no? Is this a test?”
In a 1998 Newsweek interview with President Slobodan Milosevic of the former Yugoslavia, Ms. Weymouth grilled him on his support of Serbian forces in Bosnia responsible for ethnic cleansing. “What ethnic cleansing?” he defiantly said, adding, “I have a clear conscience.”
Ms. Weymouth’s broad travel, knowledge of foreign affairs and outspokenness about her own politics (which zigged from the left to the right over the years) made dinner parties she hosted at her Upper East Side apartment heady affairs.
Guests might bump into Henry Kissinger or Barbara Walters. The New York literary lions Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal had a well-chronicled drinks-tossing fight at her home in 1977. When Ms. Weymouth tried to intervene, by some accounts, the magazine editor Clay Felker admonished, “Shut up, this fight is making your party.”
Ms. Weymouth was the Graham family member to wear most naturally the mantle of power hostess that her mother wielded as the ruler of social Washington.
She gave an annual July 4 celebration at her estate in Southampton, N.Y., where one might encounter the Hollywood mogul Barry Diller and Peter Jennings of ABC News roaming the lawn; and an annual lunch in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum.
Ms. Weymouth was fashionable and chic, with a tall and lanky figure of the type that the designer Oscar de la Renta liked to drape, and that the author Tom Wolfe described as a “social X-ray” in “Bonfire of the Vanities.”
In 2011, at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, Ms. Weymouth invited the reality-TV star Donald J. Trump and seated him beside her. Some chroniclers date Mr. Trump’s decision to run for the White House and wreak vengeance on East Coast elites to President Barack Obama’s roasting of him that night — in the tradition of the event — for his gaudy taste and fixation on conspiracies.
Elizabeth Morris Graham was born on July 3, 1943, in Washington. After her father became The Post’s publisher, her mother filled the role of caretaker and hostess. Senators, Supreme Court justices and President-elect John F. Kennedy were guests in the Grahams’ Georgetown mansion. In 1963, Mr. Graham killed himself after being released from a psychiatric hospital, where he was treated for manic depression.
Her father, she told People, “was the person I cared for most in the world. … He was always the person there in case you did something disastrous.”
The day before the funeral, Mrs. Graham, his widow, spoke to the company’s all-male board of directors, which terrified her, she wrote in a memoir, “Personal History.” Lally, then 19, jumped into her car in her nightgown before the meeting with notes of what she should say. “It touches me still that this young girl, who was, if anything, more devastated than I, could scribble out this simple but correct sequence of thoughts,” wrote Mrs. Graham, who assumed the role of Post president and publisher.
Elizabeth, nicknamed Lally, attended the private Madeira School in McLean, Va., and grew up amid wealth and political connections, exemplified by her father persuading Mr. Kennedy in 1960 to choose the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, as his running mate.
When Lally’s father took her to New York to buy dresses for her coming-out parties in 1961, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar helped her shop. The next stop was to meet Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady, at the Carlyle Hotel.
Ms. Weymouth graduated in 1965 from Radcliffe with a B.A. in American history and literature. In 1964, while a senior, she married Yann Weymouth, an architect, and she briefly was a reporter at The Boston Globe before becoming a mother.
Later describing their marriage as a “horribly rash” decision, they divorced in 1970, and Ms. Weymouth entered book publishing at the suggestion of family friend, the British publisher George Weidenfeld. She and the graphic designer Milton Glaser collaborated on “America in 1876: The Way We Were,” a best-selling softcover volume timed to the American bicentennial.
Ms. Weymouth, who was often described as mercurial in her personality, embraced progressive politics in the 1970s, when the acidic left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn was her live-in companion. She shifted right in the 1980s, when she dated Eric Breindel, an editorial page editor and tormentor of liberals for The New York Post.
In 1986, the conservative Washington Times, founded by the Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon, offered Ms. Weymouth a job. Her mother, then chair of The Washington Post Company, and her brother Don, the paper’s publisher, made a counteroffer: Come to The Post as a roving correspondent and occasional columnist, which she accepted.
Ms. Weymouth’s oldest daughter, Katharine Weymouth, became publisher of The Post in 2008. She held the position until 2014, one year after the Graham family sold the financially struggling paper to the billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Newsweek had been sold in 2010 for $1 to the audio equipment tycoon Sidney Harman.
Besides Katharine and her brother Donald, Ms. Weymouth is survived by a second daughter, Pamela Weymouth; her brother Stephen; and five grandchildren. Her brother William died in 2017.
Paradoxically, Ms. Weymouth was the last Graham family member with ties to The Post, where her title was senior associate editor. She sat down with Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan two weeks before she was assassinated in 2007 and interviewed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in January 2022, a month before Russia invaded.
Her last column, in May 2025, was an interview with the prime minister of Qatar.
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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