John Walcott, the former Washington bureau chief for McClatchy and Knight Ridder newspapers, left the company in October 2010.

He has been foreign editor and national editor of U.S. News & World Report, national security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal and a correspondent at Newsweek. His work has won the Edward M. Hood Award and the Freedom of the Press Award from the National Press Club and three Overseas Press Club awards.

In 2005, he was part of a team that won a National Headliners Award for "How the Bush Administration Went to War in Iraq.'' He is co-author of the book "Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America's War Against Terrorism."

In 2008, Walcott was named the first recipient of the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, sponsored by Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism. He was honored for leading a team of reporters whose skeptical coverage of the Bush administration's claims about Iraq's weapons programs in the months before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 was largely unmatched by other news outlets — and also largely ignored by policymakers.