They gave Katherine "Kay" Graham a fine send-off, one that her daughter, journalist Lally Weymouth, said "she would have loved". It could have been a state funeral, leavened by anecdote and warm memories, testimony to the extraordinary reach of and affection for a woman for whom the title "publisher" seemed inadequate.
Paying tribute, the historian Dr Arthur Schlesinger jnr spoke of a woman who overcame "tormenting self-doubt" and "in vindicating herself was a quiet revolutionary on behalf of all women". Ben Bradlee, the editor she brought to the Washington Post, called her a "spectacular dame".
Nearly 4,000, many of them the pre-eminent in their various fields, packed the vast Gothic Episcopalian Washington National Cathedral. Hundreds more listened outside. Twelve hundred employees of the Washington Post, her paper, were bused in, leaving the barest skeleton staff to produce a paper. Five TV stations carried the ceremony live.
The massive cathedral overlooks the north-west of the city she loved, just up the hill from Georgetown where she lived and where she famously entertained the great, the good and not so good.
The attendance ran from the Vice-President, Mr Dick Cheney, to former president, Mr Bill Clinton, and Senator Hillary Clinton. It encompassed three generations of American life, dozens from both sides of the House and Senate, members of the current and past cabinets, friends from business and the arts. City officials, not least the mayor, Mr Frank Williams, were there to pay tribute to her personal role in reconciling the city's racial tensions.
Among the ushers were friends Mr Bill Gates, of Microsoft, investor Mr Warren Buffet, and journalist Barbara Walters. The pallbearers included the former defence secretary, Mr Robert McNamara, lawyer Mr Vernon Jordan, and Senator Bob Graham, Mrs Graham's brother-in-law.
The former secretary of state, Dr Henry Kissinger, paid tribute to her courage, seeing in her a "symbol of the permanent Washington" who saw in conflict the importance not of victories but eventual reconciliation.
Mr Bradlee told of how, when the former vice-president, Mr Spiro Agnew, had sought to subpoena reporters' notebooks, the paper's lawyers had advanced what he called the "widowed grandmother defence". The notebooks did not belong to the reporters, they argued, but to the publisher, and then defied the court to jail Mrs Graham.
Dr Schlesinger said her legacy included two crucial battles against the "imperial presidency" over the Pentagon papers and Watergate, and joked about the most celebrated of all newspaper sources, "Deep Throat, who may very well be among us this morning". Given the occasion and cast of characters, the qualified "may" seemed redundant.