Donald
Oberdorfer spent 38 years at the Washington Post, including 17 as the
newspaper’s diplomatic correspondent. Before that, he covered the
White House from 1968 until 1972, and was the Tokyo-based correspondent
covering Northeast Asia from 1972 until 1975.
Oberdorfer is currently the journalist-in-residence at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. He has received numerous awards including the 1981 and 1988 Edwin M. Hood Award for diplomatic correspondence given by the National Press Club. He is also a two-time winner of Georgetown University’s Edward Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting.
In addition to The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History, he is also the author of Tet!, a history of the 1968 battle in Vietnam; and The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era, a history of U.S.-Soviet diplomacy from 1983 to 1990.