Founder of Seeds of Peace
NEW YORK | John Wallach, a foreign correspondent whose close-up views of Middle East violence inspired him to gather teenagers from warring lands at the Seeds of Peace camp in Otisfield, Maine, died Wednesday. He was 59.
Wallach lost a long battle with lung cancer at his Manhattan home.
As the foreign editor for Hearst Newspapers from 1968 to 1994, Wallach broke several stories related to the Iran-Contra affair and the CIA’s covert mining of Nicaraguan waters. He received the National Press Club’s highest honor.
But it was for his work with Seeds of Peace that he was awarded the United Nations’ UNESCO Peace Prize in 1996 and was honored by Jordan’s King Hussein with the Legion of Honor of the Hashemite Kingdom.
“With the Seeds of Peace, John pierced the future, because he concluded that today’s adults were not succeeding in finding a peace process. And he thought maybe it’ll be the next generation that’ll make it,” said CNN commentator Bernard Kalb, who had covered the State Department alongside Wallach.