Donald Neff joined Time magazine in 1965, and, based in Saigon, covered the Vietnam War for two years. He was then appointed Time‘s bureau chief in Houston (where he covered the Apollo moon landing). He worked as Time magazine’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief before leaving the magazine in 1979. He wrote a retrospective piece in 1995 detailing the change in his pro-Zionist perspective during his years as correspondent in the Middle East.

Neff thereafter wrote mainly for the London-based Middle East International and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. He authored several books, including a trilogy on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Neff died in York, Pennsylvania on May 10, 2015 of heart disease and diabetes, aged 84.