Lally Weymouth, a journalist and socialite who secured interviews with world leaders including Saddam Hussein, Yasir Arafat and Muammar el-Qaddafi, died Monday at her home in Manhattan, her daughter announced.
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Her daughter Katharine Weymouth said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Ms. Weymouth belonged to the Graham family that owned The Washington Post for 80 years. She was the granddaughter, daughter, sister and mother of publishers of The Post, but was never given a leadership role at the paper.
Graham Family Legacy
Elizabeth Morris Graham was born on July 3, 1943, in Washington. Her maternal grandfather, 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 presided 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. Mrs. Graham wanted just one of her children involved in running the paper, Roswell L. Gilpatric, a Graham family lawyer, told author Carol Felsenthal for an unauthorised 1993 biography of Mrs. Graham, “Power, Privilege and The Post.”
Ms. Weymouth told Washingtonian magazine in a 2011 interview that 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.”
Edward Kosner, a former editor of New York Magazine, where she was a contributor, said in an interview that Ms. Weymouth resented being left out but was motivated to carve out a career on her own. “I think her family situation drove her ambition,” Mr. Kosner said.
Journalism Career
Ms. Weymouth worked as a freelance writer for New York, 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 specialise 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, including President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and dictators like Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.
In a 2006 Newsweek interview, she questioned 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 questioned him on his support of Serbian forces in Bosnia responsible for ethnic cleansing. “What ethnic cleansing?” he said, adding, “I have a clear conscience.”
In 1986, the conservative Washington Times 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.
Early Life and Education
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.
Ms. Weymouth entered book publishing at the suggestion of family friend, British publisher George Weidenfeld. She and graphic designer Milton Glaser collaborated on “America in 1876: The Way We Were,” a best-selling softcover volume timed to the American bicentennial.
Social Life and Entertaining
Ms. Weymouth’s broad travel, knowledge of foreign affairs and outspokenness about her own politics made dinner parties she hosted at her Upper East Side apartment heady affairs. Guests might include Henry Kissinger or Barbara Walters. The New York literary figures 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, magazine editor Clay Felker said, “Shut up, this fight is making your party.”
She gave an annual July 4 celebration at her estate in Southampton, N.Y., where one might encounter 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.
Privileged Upbringing
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.
Elizabeth, nicknamed Lally, attended the private Madeira School in McLean, Va. When her 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.
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.”
Father’s Death
In 1963, Mr. Graham killed himself after being released from a psychiatric hospital, where he was treated for manic depression. The day before the funeral, Mrs. Graham 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.
Political Shifts
Ms. Weymouth embraced progressive politics in the 1970s, when the 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 for The New York Post.
Family Succession and Final Years
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 billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Newsweek had been sold in 2010 for $1 to audio equipment tycoon Sidney Harman.
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.
Ms. Weymouth is survived by her daughters Katharine and Pamela Weymouth; her brothers Donald and Stephen; and five grandchildren. Her brother William died in 2017.
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