Lally Weymouth Biography

Elizabeth Morris "Lally" Graham Weymouth (born July 3, 1943) is an American journalist who serves as Senior Associate Editor of the Washington Post. She previously served as Special Diplomatic Correspondent of Newsweek magazine, during her family's ownership of the publication.

Early life and education

She is the eldest of the four children of Katharine Graham and Philip Graham, both of whom were publishers of the Post. Her maternal grandmother, Agnes Meyer, was a German Lutheran. Her maternal grandfather, Eugene Meyer, was German Jewish and descended from a rabbinical family in Strasbourg. He bought the bankrupt Post shortly after stepping down as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in mid-1933. Her mother was baptized as a Lutheran but attended an Episcopal church. The eldest of her three brothers is Donald E. Graham, who was the publisher of the Post from 1979 to 2000, a position held by Weymouth's daughter Katharine Weymouth since 2008.

Weymouth attended The Madeira School and graduated from Radcliffe College at Harvard University cum laude with a degree in American History and Literature.

Career

From 1968 to 1969, Weymouth worked for Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation.

Weymouth edited and compiled Thomas Jefferson: The Man, His World, His Influence (1973, G.P. Putnam), a collection which includes contributions from leading Jeffersonian scholars. She is the author of America in 1876, The Way We Were (1976, Random House). She worked as a freelance journalist and contributing editor from 1977 to 1983 for such publications as New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, and Parade. From 1983 to 1986 she was a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times.

Weymouth presently serves as Senior Associate Editor of the Washington Post. She has been writing on foreign affairs and conducting exclusive interviews with foreign heads of state since 1986. Some notable past interviews include: the last foreign interview with Pakistan"?s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto two weeks before her death, President Karzai of Afghanistan, Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, President Musharraf of Pakistan two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Chavez of Venezuela, President Assad of Syria, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Saddam Hussein, and President Rousseff's first English-language interview following her election in Brazil. She interviewed President Lukashenko in Belarus after the violent crackdown of the opposition on the eve of the December 2010 elections. She traveled to Israel and Ramallah in February 2011, where she conducted an interview with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Fayyad. In May 2011, Lally Weymouth met with Egyptian Foreign Minister el-Araby, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, and members of the Supreme Military Council in Cairo. In September 2011, Lally Weymouth traveled to Tehran, where she was granted an exclusive interview with President Ahmadinejad in advance of his trip to the United States to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

Personal life

In 1963, she married architect Yann Weymouth (whose sister is Tina Weymouth who was the bassist for the art-rock band Talking Heads from 1974 to 1991). They divorced in 1969. They had two children:

• Katharine Weymouth, publisher for the Washington Post
• Pamela Alma Weymouth, writer for Huffington Post.