COLOSSUS WHO HUMBLED THE MIGHTY
From Thalidomide to the exposure of Kim Philby, his campaigns against injustice changed the world. RICHARD KAY salutes Fleet Street icon Sir Harold Evans, who’s died at 92
Trump’s 1997 book The Art Of The Comeback. As an adopted New Yorker, Evans knew Trump well. ‘He was a genial fellow-about-town, you know?’ he observed three years ago. ‘He wasn’t an ogre. He wasn’t what he became.’
He also published a book by an unknown senator from Illinois called Barack Obama. Dreams From My Father became a huge bestseller and helped usher in the Obama presidency.
Then, at the age of 89, Evans made it on to the bestseller lists himself with Do I Make Myself Clear?, a brilliant guide to good writing.
Throughout his life he had a deep and abiding love for America, but never turned his back on his British roots. He became a U.S. citizen in 1993 and was knighted for services to journalism in 2004.
To underline that love for the U.S., he wrote two seminal books, probably his best known, The American Century in 1998 and its 2004 sequel, They Made America.
Fortune magazine described the second volume as one of the best books in 75 years.
It was later adapted as a fourpart TV mini-series.
CONSIDERING HE had lived in New York since 1984, and that so much of the Fleet Street he had known and loved had disappeared, it is remarkable that Evans remained such a giant of the British newspaper world to the end of his days.
Born in Eccles, to a railwayman father and a mother who ran a grocery shop out of the family home, Evans’s background was no guarantee of the stellar success he was to enjoy.
He left school at 16 and got a job as a reporter on a local weekly paper. After National Service in the rAF, he went to night school to educate himself. It paid off and he won a place at Durham University, going on to work for the Manchester Evening News before, in 1961, being appointed editor of The Northern Echo.
It was there that he gained a reputation for campaigning journalism, including demands for smear tests to detect cervical cancer which led to national screening.
Six years later, in 1967, he was appointed editor of The Sunday Times where an early task was to set up the paper’s famous Insight investigations team.
He embodied the romantic idea of an editor — dogged and tireless in the pursuit of truth and, in the Distillers battles, justice. For all the scoops he oversaw, it was Thalidomide that was his greatest accomplishment and put his name in lights. But he also adored the minutiae of editing a newspaper, writing the headlines, choosing impactful pictures and staying at the office late into the night when the paper was printed.
In 1981, after the Times titles were bought by rupert Murdoch, he was offered the editorship of The Times and took it. ‘ My ambition got the better of my judgment,’ he wrote in memoir good Times, Bad Times.
The two men clashed over Evans’ failure to fully back then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and, after a mere six months as editor, Evans was sacked the day after returning to the office from his father’s funeral.
In recent times, he has described losing that post as the greatest regret of his life. It could, of course, have been the end of his career but that was not to be.
The irrepressible Evans — always Harry to his friends — reinvented himself in America, the country that loves to give a man a second chance.
By now, he had a younger wife 26 years his junior. He was already married to Enid and a father of three when, in 1977, he met a brilliant young Oxford undergraduate called Tina Brown, whose agent had submitted some of her writing to him.
He gave her a job and, a year later, realised he was falling in love with her. He later declared it an ‘absurd state of affairs’. He divorced Enid and, in 1981, Tina and Harry were married at the Long Island home of the then Washington Post supremo Ben Bradlee.
AS A media couple, they had no parallel. Harry now was happy to take something of a backseat as Tina began her whirlwind climb in magazines. When she became editor of the venerable New Yorker, he declared: ‘I am so proud of her.’
He even chuckled when waspish gossip columnists dubbed him ‘ Mr Harold Brown’. Not an envious man, he rejoiced in his wife’s success.
He was devoted to her and their children, george and Isabel.
On Twitter, Ms Brown said that her husband was ‘ the most magical of men’ and ‘my soulmate for 39 years’.
As old age took a grip, Evans, always a wiry figure, refused to slow down. A fitness fanatic, he took up skiing in his 40s and played squash and tennis into his 80s. He once competed in the English Open Championships in table tennis.
While Covid and lockdown in New York meant he was unable to enjoy his daily swim, he never lost that enthusiasm for news and what made the world tick.
More than anything, he loved being at the ringside of history.