Relentless campaigner with a generous heart
SIR HAROLD EVANS was a BritishAmerican editor whose 70year career as a harddriving investigative journalist, magazine founder, book publisher and author made him one of the most influential media figures of his generation.
He died in New York on September 23, aged 92.
A former editor of Britain’s Sunday Times and, at his death, Reuters editoratlarge, Evans put a unique stamp on investigative journalism, championing causes either overlooked or denied.
One of his most famous investigations exposed the plight of British thalidomide children who had never received any compensation. Evans organised a campaign to take on the drug companies responsible, an effort that eventually won compensation for the families after more than a decade.
‘‘All I tried to do — all I hoped to do — was to shed a little light,’’ Evans said in 2014. ‘‘And if that light grew weeds, we’d have to try and pull them up.’’
After 14 years at The Sunday Times, Evans became editor of
The Times of London shortly after media mogul Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in 1981. Evans left a year later in a dispute with Murdoch over editorial independence.
A few years later, Evans moved to the United States with Tina Brown, the journalist and editor to whom he was married for nearly 40 years. He continued his career as an author, publisher and university lecturer. He penned several books, including The American Century (1998) and its sequel, They Made America (2004), as well as an ode to good writing called Do I Make Myself Clear? (2017).
Evans founded Conde Nast Traveler magazine and served as president and publisher of Random House from 1990 to 1997. Under his leadership, Random House scored various publishing successes, including Primary Colors, a satire about Bill Clinton by Anonymous, later revealed to be journalist Joe Klein, and Colin Powell’s My American Journey.
‘Respectable working class’
Born to a family from what he called ‘‘the respectable working class’’, Evans was knighted in 2004 for his services to British journalism. Two years earlier, a poll by Britain’s Press Gazette and the British Journalism Review named him the greatest newspaper editor of all time.
Evans joined Reuters in 2011.
In his role as editoratlarge, he moderated conversations with global newsmakers in business and politics who included Tony Blair, Mark Cuban, Al Gore, John Kerry and Henry Kissinger.
‘‘Harry Evans . . . had an insatiable intellect, extraordinary tenacity, high principle and a generous heart,’’ Reuters editorinchief Stephen J. Adler said.
Evans also had a sense of humour. ‘‘Editoratlarge means you’re free to create as much havoc as they will tolerate,’’ he was quoted as saying by the
Financial Times.
Harold Matthew Evans was born in Greater Manchester, England, on June 28, 1928, the son of a train driver.
He took his first reporting job at a newspaper at age 16, then studied at Durham University. After serving in the military and earning a master’s degree, he became an assistant editor at the
Manchester Evening News.
In 1961 he was named editor of The Northern Echo and first developed his reputation as a relentless journalist with campaigns against air pollution and for a national programme to detect cervical cancer. He became editor of The Sunday
Times in 1967.
Kim Philby spy case
In 1967, The Sunday Times
published an expose of British intelligence officer Kim Philby’s decades as a Soviet spy, despite objections from the British government that the report would endanger national security.
When Murdoch bought The Sunday Times and The Times in 1981, he installed Evans as editor of The Times but the relationship quickly turned sour. Evans said the British government allowed Murdoch to buy the newspapers because of pledges he made to uphold editorial independence.
‘‘He broke them all within a year,’’ Evans said in 2013.
He said his own writings about then prime minister Margaret Thatcher caused the rift.
‘‘When she started to dismantle the British economy, the most cogent critic of that policy . . . was
The Sunday Times,’’ he told the
Independent. ‘‘I wrote 70% of that criticism myself.’’
He called his ousting from The
Times ‘‘the saddest moment of my life.’’ In 1984, Evans and Brown moved to the United States, where he taught at Duke University in North Carolina and later held positions with various newspapers and journals.
In addition to his wife, Evans leaves children Isabel, Georgie, Ruth, Michael and Kate Evans. — Reuters