Donald Oberdorfer Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia on May 28, 1931. He graduated from Princeton University in 1952. He served in the Army in Korea after the war. He worked as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer, The Saturday Evening Post, and Knight Newspapers before joining The Washington Post in 1968. After he retired as a reporter in 1993, he taught at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He wrote several books during his lifetime including The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History, Tet!, and The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era; the United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1990. He died on July 23, 2015 from complications of Alzheimer's disease at the age of 84.