Mary Grace Bassett

Grace Bassett, a journalist who covered District affairs on Capitol Hill for The Washington Post and the old Washington Star, most notably chronicling passage of the constitutional amendment giving D.C. residents a voice in presidential elections, died June 8 at a nursing home in Annandale, Va. She was 93.

The cause was complications from dementia, said her friend and power of attorney, Robin Renner.

Ms. Bassett worked at The Post from 1953 to 1957 and won a Washington Newspaper Guild Award for her coverage of the District’s response to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board outlawing racial segregation in public schools.

At the Star, where she spent about a decade, her beat was urban legislation in Congress. The American Political Science Association honored her for excellence in political reporting for the two years she spent following the campaign for the 23rd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Ratified in 1961, it authorized D.C. residents to choose electors in presidential elections.

Ms. Bassett was a frequent guest on public affairs TV shows and, after studying politics, sociology and economics at Columbia University on a Russell Sage Foundation grant, became a consultant in the late 1960s on urban issues for clients such as Newsweek and RCA. In 1968, she was an assistant campaign manager in the unsuccessful candidacy of Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Starting in 1970, she wrote a column for the Hearst media empire’s King Features Syndicate. Six years later, she left journalism for a position as assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Ms. Bassett obtained a law degree at Georgetown University in 1979, but macular degeneration abbreviated her legal practice.

Mary Grace Bassett was born in Spokane, Wash., on Aug. 17, 1926, and grew up in Okanogan, Wash., where her mother taught high school and her father was a banker. She was a 1947 political science graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., and received a master’s degree the next year from Columbia University’s journalism school.

After two years as a reporter for the Spokesman-Review of Spokane, she did postgraduate study at the University of Paris and University of Frankfurt before joining The Post.

She never married and had no immediate survivors. In 2001, she wrote “A Glimpse of Grace,” a book about her aunt Grace Jones, a noted interior designer in the Pacific Northwest.

Ms. Bassett once won a national senior indoor singles tennis championship and made a flurry of news for her prowess on skiing trails.

In 1974, she was in the reporting pool that accompanied President Gerald Ford to Vail, Colo., where on Christmas Day she and another newswoman encountered the president on the slopes.

According to a United Press International account, he was informed the women wanted to ski with him. “It depends on whether they are pretty,” he said with a grin, before turning to a Secret Service agent for approval. The agent shook his head no.

“You don’t have to obey him,” the reporters responded.

Ms. Bassett continued on her way and later assessed the day’s skiing in her pool report: “The sky was clear blue, . . . the snow, off the tracks, was like a coat of marshmallow frosting — really with diamond sparkles in it.”