At a private fund-raising reception last year, the president of the United States introduced himself this way: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a friend of Esther Coopersmith’s.”
Mrs. Coopersmith’s name has been a calling card in Washington for seven decades. As one of the longest-reigning hostesses, best-connected diplomats and top fund-raisers in the nation’s capital, she greased the machinery that helped keep political, diplomatic and journalistic circles spinning; a place at her dinner tables, which sat 75, (with room for many more elsewhere and outside) provided access to networks of money, influence and power across cultural and political divides.
Among her many matches, she introduced Bill Clinton, who was then the governor of Arkansas, to Boris Yeltsin on a trip to Moscow. She introduced Jehan Sadat, the wife of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, to Aliza Begin, the wife of Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, before the Camp David peace accords. Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States, had his first Thanksgiving at her table.
“People need a place out of the public spotlight to meet and talk,” she told The New York Times in 1987.
Mrs. Coopersmith, who had multiple affiliations with the United Nations but who also reveled in her role as a freelancing citizen diplomat, died on Tuesday at her home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington. She was 94.
The cause was cancer, said Janet Pitt, her longtime chief of staff. Rather than seek treatment that might have only postponed the inevitable and made her miserable, Ms. Pitt said, Mrs. Coopersmith “wanted to live her life.”
The last public event Mrs. Coopersmith attended was the Gridiron dinner in mid-March. That annual political roast was one of her favorite outings, Ms. Pitt said, because she could bring dignitaries from other countries and show them “how we could poke fun at our politicians and our government and live to tell about it the next day.”
President Biden said in a statement after Mrs. Coopersmith’s death that she was one of his “early boosters” when he was 29 and ran for the Senate in 1972. “Her belief in me,” he said, “meant the world.”
Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, said in a statement, “For all my years in politics, I have been in awe of her.” In an obituary published on Legacy.com, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called her “the indomitable doyenne of Washington.”
Mrs. Coopersmith grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and caught the politics bug while listening to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats on the radio. She moved to Washington in the early 1950s, landed a lobbying job and quickly parlayed her skills — personal warmth, self-confidence, smarts about people — into fund-raising.
Mrs. Coopersmith was fascinated by power and the alchemy that it produced. As she told The Times in 1987:
“I do it because I love the activity, the excitement, I love to mix people up, I love sharing my home. In New York if you have a lot of money you can buy your way into anything. Here it is power that counts — what your position is or could be. It is wonderful to watch power and how power affects people, how they run with it, how they adjust to it.”
While bipartisan in her pursuits, she was a Democrat at heart and over the years raised millions of dollars for the party’s candidates. By 1958, she was rubbing shoulders with the likes of former President Harry S. Truman, who scribbled on a photo of the two of them, “Kindest regards to an able and efficient Democrat from one who knows!”
Such mementos accumulated and in time occupied nearly every square inch of space in Mrs. Coopersmith’s four-story brick mansion. They included signed photos of decades of Washington players and international personages and a telegram from Mr. Carter thanking…
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