Greenfield won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing.

She attended The Bush School and graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1952.

She also studied at Cambridge University as a Fulbright Scholar and was friends there with Norman Podhoretz, who also went on to a career in journalism.

She became influential in a male-dominated world and a close confidante of Post publisher Katharine Graham.

[4] When diagnosed with cancer, Greenfield partly retired to Bainbridge Island in her native Washington, where she wrote a posthumously published memoir entitled Washington.