Lally Weymouth, journalist and daughter of The Washington Post’s Graham family, has died
Sep 29, 2025, 9:12 PM | Updated: Oct 1, 2025, 12:00 pm
Lally Weymouth, the daughter of the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham who forged her own journalistic career that included interviewing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi among other world leaders, has died. She was 82.
Weymouth died Monday at her home in Manhattan. The cause was pancreatic cancer, her daughter Katharine Weymouth told The Washington Post.
Born Elizabeth Morris Graham, Lally Weymouth was most recently a senior associate editor at the paper. Her latest piece was an interview with Qatari Emir Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani that ran shortly before President Donald Trump visited his country in May. It appeared in the opinion section in her preferred question-and-answer format.
Weymouth interviewed every Israeli prime minister since 1981, a biography posted on the paper’s website said. She also interviewed Britain’s then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Argentine President Javier Milei.
She told the Washingtonian magazine in 2011 that her mother picked her brother Donald E. Graham to run the paper in the 1970s.
“I didn’t want to go to the Post. I wanted to make it on my own,” she said.
She said an editor for Newsweek — owned by her family — asked her to interview foreign leaders and suggested she make it her specialty. She also wrote for the Los Angeles Times.
In 2015, the May Chidiac Foundation, a Lebanon-based nonprofit organization, awarded Weymouth their Antoine Choueiri Special Tribute for Lifetime Achievement.
She edited and compiled “Thomas Jefferson: The Man, His World, His Influence” which was published in 1973. A book she authored, “America in 1876: The Way We Were,” was published three years later.
Weymouth’s grandfather, Don Graham, bought the venerable Washington Post at a 1933 bankruptcy sale. He boosted the paper’s reputation and tripled circulation before handing control in the 1940s to son-in-law, Philip L. Graham. Weymouth’s mother took over after her husband’s death in 1963. She was at the helm when the newspaper uncovered the Watergate story that led President Richard Nixon to resign.
The family sold the paper to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013.
