Ruth Forbes Paine Young - Obit

Ruth F. Young, 94, Founded An Academy to Promote Peace

By Enid Nemy

March 15, 1998

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/15/us/ruth-f-young-94-founded-an-academy-to-promote-peace.html

Ruth Forbes Young, who founded the International Peace Academy, an organization that trains negotiators, diplomats and military personnel in peacekeeping and provides meeting grounds for diplomats involved in efforts to prevent hostilities, died on March 5 at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She was 94.

Mrs. Young's interest in peace started with the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. She first joined the World Federalists, a group that worked to influence governments toward peace, but came to believe that an organization that directly involved private citizens would be more effective.

''When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, I realized that something enormous had happened, something that had never happened before and that people should take responsibility about what to do about it, for the world would be a really different place from now on,'' she said in a videotaped history of the academy, which is based in Manhattan. ''U Thant was Secretary General of the United Nations at the time. So I asked for a meeting with him. He responded and met me and sat on a bench with me outside. I told him my ideas that an international peace academy could be really useful, but I did not know the right people to start such a thing and how would you suggest I go about it.''

U Thant recommended that she enlist the aid of Maj. Gen. Indar Jit Rikhye, who had been military adviser to U Thant and Dag Hammarskjold. After helping establish the academy in 1970, General Rikhye became its first president, holding that position for 20 years. Mrs. Young provided the start-up money for the organization and, together with several foundations, continued to contribute to its financing.

The academy consists of a few specialists who prepare training models in conflict avoidance, mediation, negotiation, maintaining cease-fires and armistice agreements, negotiation and peacekeeping. There were also off-the-record meetings that brought together United Nations representatives, government officials and an assortment of specialists.

More recently, the group sponsored informal monthly breakfast meetings, also off the record, for such participants and led by Olara Otunnu, the current president, and Rita Hauser, chairwoman of the board.

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''The academy has helped in the career development of hundreds of diplomats and military commanders,'' General Rikhye said from his home in Charlottesville, Va. ''Its pioneering efforts in training future peacekeepers and trainers have had a global impact.''

Mrs. Young was born into a family of diplomats in Milton, Mass., the daughter of Ralph Emerson Forbes and Elise Cabot and a great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her uncle Cameron Forbes was the first Governor-General of the Philippines and often entertained government and military officials, including President William Howard Taft and Gen. John J. Pershing.

In the mid-1920's, she married George Lyman Paine Jr., an architect in New York City. They divorced in the 1930's. Two sons, Michael Paine of Harvard, Mass., and Cameron Paine of Tylersport, Pa., and two grandchildren survive.

In the early 40's she married Dr. Giles Thomas, a psychologist in Manhattan, who died several years later. Her third marriage, to Arthur M. Young, who built the first helicopter to be certified for commercial use, was in 1948.

The couple set up the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley in 1972, believing that the world had become too focused on material objects and needed a new spiritual and moral order. Mr. Young died in 1995.