Lally Graham Weymouth

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 out her own niche largely away from the paper by securing hard-to-land interviews with foreign leaders, including Saddam Hussein, Yasir Arafat and Muammar el-Qaddafi, died in October 2025 at her home in Manhattan. She was 82. Weymouth was the granddaughter, daughter, sister and mother of publishers of The Washington Post. 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, Graham anointed her oldest son, Donald, as her successor in the early 1970s. and wanted just one of her children involved in running the paper, Lally Weymouth resented being left out. She was as a freelance writer in the 1970s. She had 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. They divorced in 1970, She joined the Washington Post on 1986 as a roving correspondent and occasional columnist Her oldest daughter, Katharine Weymouth, became publisher of The Post in 2008 and held that position until 2014, when the Graham family sold the financially struggling paper to the billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Ms. Weymouth is survived by Katharine as well as another daughter, Pamela Weymouth; her brothers Donald and Stephen; and five grandchildren. Her brother William died in 2017.