Washington Post veteran correspondent and Korea expert Don Oberdorfer dies at 84

Don Oberdorfer, a former Washington Post diplomatic correspondent who chronicled international news from the Vietnam War to the fall of the Soviet Union, earning a reputation as one of the most insightful, fair-minded reporters on his globe-spanning beat, died on Thursday in Washington. He was 84.

He had Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Laura Oberdorfer.

Oberdorfer spent 25 years with The Post, beginning in 1968, when he was hired away from the Knight Newspapers chain by Benjamin Bradlee. Bradlee, named executive editor that year, would later write in his memoir, A Good Life, that Oberdorfer was "a mortal lock to become what he became, a foreign affairs expert who could and did peg even with the very best foreign affairs experts."

Oberdorfer’s years of reportage filled an uncounted number of broadsheet pages and half a dozen books that made him known particularly as an expert in Asian affairs.

After retiring from The Post in 1993, he taught at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and chaired its US-Korea Institute. His 1997 book, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History, later updated with scholar Robert Carlin, was regarded as a seminal work on the Korean peninsula.

Oberdorfer began his career at The Post as a White House correspondent and was northeast Asia correspondent, based in Tokyo, in the early 1970s. He was most recognised, however, as The Post’s correspondent for US diplomacy, an assignment that took him to more than 50 countries.