The NCAFP Honors and Remembers Dr. Donald Zagoria

Donald S. Zagoria, historian, noted foreign policy expert, and professor of political science at
Hunter College and Columbia University, passed away peacefully in his sleep in his Crugers,
N.Y. home on September 16, 2025.

Dr. Zagoria recently celebrated his 97th birthday and received his annual shoutout from Yankees
broadcaster Michael Kay during the Yankees-Red Sox game on Aug. 24. On the day he passed,
the Yankees nearly blew a 10-1 lead against the Minnesota Twins, only to hold on for a 10-9
victory. Dr. Zagoria surely would have been vexed at the path to victory but would have joked
about it with a twinkle in his brown eyes.

A devoted husband (to his late wife Janet), father (to his son Adam) and grandfather (to Grace
and James Zagoria), Dr. Zagoria was known for his charismatic and warm personality, big smile
and even bigger heart. He related genuinely and equally to everyone from iconic colleagues like
Madeleine Albright, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, to his many friends and family
members, to people he just met.

“[Dr. Zagoria] made such a significant impact on the work of the National Committee [on
American Foreign Policy],” said Susan Elliott, President of the National Committee, where he
served as Senior Vice President and Project Director for the Forum on Asia-Pacific Security

(FAPS) “Every time we talked to people in Asia, they always asked about him and wanted us to
send him their regards. He was a legend.”

During a career spanning some 60 years, Dr. Zagoria served as a foreign policy consultant to the
administration of President Jimmy Carter, wrote or edited four books and recorded more than
1,500 bylines in publications such as Foreign Affairs, Public Affairs and Asian Survey.
In 1962, Dr. Zagoria published his first book entitled “The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-1961.”
The book, still a seminal work in the field, was accepted as a dissertation, enabling him to
receive his PhD from Columbia in 1963.

He was a frequent guest for television interviews in the 1970s, ’80s and ‘90s on programs such
as William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” and “The MacNeil/Lehrer News Report.”

In the classroom, Dr. Zagoria made an enduring impact on his students. One said he was
“intelligent, funny and knows how to put pseudo intellectuals into their place!“ He was a patient
instructor, but didn’t suffer fools gladly.

The son of Max Zagoria and Bessie Sacks Zagoria and the younger brother of Marvin Zagoria,
Dr. Zagoria grew up in Somerville, N.J. where his father worked as a vegetable peddler after
emigrating with his brothers from the small town of Preili, Latvia.

“Fortunately, my grandfather and grandmother had the good sense in the early part of the 20th
century to flee Russia with all of their seven children (my father had six brothers) and to come to
America. By doing this, they saved the family from Stalin and Hitler, two of the biggest mass
murderers in history,” Dr. Zagoria wrote.

“My mother’s family, the Sacks’, also came from Imperial Russia around the turn of the century
of similar reasons — to escape religious persecution and discrimination [against Jews].”
His father, Max, and older brother, Nathan, stowed away on a Russian cargo ship with only a
crust of bread between them for two weeks on the Atlantic Ocean and they arrived in the United
States penniless. They eventually joined other members of the family and went into business
selling fruits and vegetables out of a truck wholesale in Somerville, providing for their families
during the worst days of the Great Depression and sending their children to college.

In a true manifestation of the American Dream, Dr. Zagoria went in a more scholarly direction,
but was a practicing vegetarian for most of his life. He also did not drink or smoke much at all,
and was blessed with good genes.

Until his last days, he loved to eat spicy Chinese and Indian food, pizza with broccoli, chocolate-
covered almonds, cashew nuts and ice cream bars.

An avid athlete early on, Dr. Zagoria starred in basketball at Somerville High School and was
featured in the school paper the Valkyrie News, which pointed out that he led the varsity in
scoring as a 16-year-old senior with 11 points per game. His two-handed set shot remained
deadly in later life, and he would show it off against his son Adam and his friends in the
driveway in Crugers.

A fan of the Yankees along with his older brother, Dr. Zagoria saw Lou Gehrig and Joe
DiMaggio play in person at Yankee Stadium. In 1995, he attended an American League Wild
Card game with Adam and some of Adam’s Ultimate Frisbee friends, enjoying the raucous
atmosphere in the bleachers as the Yankees won. He later attended games with his son and
grandchildren at Yankee Stadium.

Dr. Zagoria earned a B.A. from Rutgers, where he originally planned to study journalism before
becoming intrigued by the Cold War and the rising importance of China. After graduating in
1948, he went to Washington, D.C. to work for the Foreign Broadcast Information Service as an
analyst of Russian and Chinese media. It was out of this work that “The Sino-Soviet Conflict”
was born.

He decided to study Soviet foreign policy with a focus on Asia. He moved from FBIS to the
Rand Corporation, and then to RICA, the Research Institute for Communist Affairs, where he
first worked with Brezinski.

In the 1950s, Dr. Zagoria was visiting his cousin Sam Zagoria in U.S. Sen. Clifford Case’s office
in Washington, D.C. when he spotted a young woman who worked in the office.
“Who is that?” he asked his cousin.

Dr. Zagoria and Janet Dorsch were married in 1961 in a partnership that lasted 56 years until
Janet’s death in 2017. “She was a rare combination of beauty, brains and grace,” Dr. Zagoria said.
During the 1960s, the couple lived in Malibu, Calif. and Dr. Zagoria drove a convertible Jaguar
for a time when he worked at Rand.

In New York, they had their only child, Adam, in 1968, with Janet telling The New York Times
for an interview about women who become mothers later in life that he was a “blessing.”

That same year, Dr. Zagoria moved from Columbia, where he had been teaching, to Hunter
College and the graduate center of CUNY where he continued to teach until he retired in 1997.
In 1969, the couple bought a 200-year-old farmhouse in Crugers that required a lot of fixing up,
with Janet often working on the house with Adam in a bassinet on the porch. Dr. Zagoria’s
parents weren’t thrilled by those developments.

The couple enjoyed discussing politics, international affairs and movies and their living room
was often overflowing with books and policy papers. Colleagues and friends from all over the
world cycled through the home, as did an array of black cats with names like Abdou, Okbar and
Macavity, and dogs named Jazzy and Daphne.

They traveled to North Korea, Siberia and Mongolia — some of the “garden spots of the world,”
Janet would crack — as well as Paris, London and St. Martin, where they vacationed every
winter. Avid skiers and tennis players, the couple traveled with Adam to ski in Canada, Vermont and
California.  In 1979, Dr. Zagoria won the singles and doubles titles in the local Town of Cortlandt tennis tournament, a source of immense pride for his son. “He was a natural left-hander but played tennis right-handed, which made his success all the more impressive,” Adam said.

Dr. Zagoria is survived by his son Adam, a sports journalist and filmmaker; his daughter-in-law
Jennifer Barton, a public relations executive; his two grandchildren, Grace and James Zagoria;
and his two nieces, Kim and Lee Taylor of California.

Grace is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Economics at Davidson College
and has studied at la Universidad de Buenos Aires, la Universidad de Alcalá, and Technische
Universität Berlin. Her academic interests include international political economy,
European–Latin American relations, and contemporary regional defense.

“He had so much talent and was brilliant and had an incredibly big heart,” Kim Taylor said of
her uncle. “He loved so hard. You don’t often get all that in one person. He cared deeply about his family but was also so talented in other areas. He was a big personality so it leaves a big hole.”