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Sir Harold Evans, the legendary editor whose 70-year career as an investigative journalist, magazine founder, book publisher and author made him one of the most influential media figures of his generation, died Wednesday at the age of 92.
Evans died of congestive heart failure in New York, according to his wife Tina Brown.
Former editor of Britain’s Sunday Times and, upon his death, editor-in-chief of Reuters, Evans put a unique stamp on investigative journalism. Defending ignored or denied causes, he and his team uncovered human rights abuses and political scandals, and championed clean air policies.
One of his most famous investigations exposed the plight of hundreds of British children with thalidomide who had never received any compensation for their birth defects. Evans organized a campaign to confront responsible drug companies, an effort that finally won compensation for families after more than a decade.
“All I tried to do, all I was hoping to do, was shed a little light,” Evans said in an interview with The Independent in 2014. “And if that light grew weeds, we would have to try to pull them up. “
After 14 years at the Sunday Times, Evans became editor of the Times shortly after Rupert Murdoch bought the newspaper 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 Brown, the journalist and editor to whom he was married for almost 40 years. He continued his career as an author, editor, and university professor. He wrote several books, including The American Century (1998) and its sequel They Made America (2004), as well as an ode to good writing titled Do I Make Myself Clear? (2017).
It became the subject of books and documentaries, including Attacking The Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime (2014), about the thalidomide campaign.
Evans founded Conde Nast Traveler magazine and served as president and editor of Random House from 1990 to 1997.
Under his leadership, Random House scored several best-sellers, including the best-seller Primary Colors, a satire on Anonymous’s Bill Clinton, later revealed as journalist Joe Klein, and Colin Powell’s My American Journey.
He was born in Greater Manchester in 1928, the son of a train conductor in a family of what he called “the respectable working class”. Evans was knighted in 2004 for his services to British journalism. Two years earlier, a poll by the British Press Gazette and the British Journalism Review named him the best newspaper publisher of all time.
Evans joined Reuters in 2011. In his role as managing editor, Evans moderated conversations with global newsmakers in business and politics, including Tony Blair, Mark Cuban, Al Gore, John Kerry, Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis and Satya Nadella.
“Harry Evans was an inspiration, not just as a great journalist but as a great man. He had an insatiable intellect, extraordinary tenacity, high principles and a generous heart, “said Stephen J. Adler, editor-in-chief of Reuters.
Evans also had a sense of humor. “Editor in general means that you are free to create as much havoc as they tolerate,” Evans said according to the Financial Times.
Donald Trelford, former editor of the Observer, wrote in a review of Evans’ memoirs published in 2009 titled My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times: “He was the inventor of team journalism. In the editorial chair, he was a human dynamo and launched a stream of stories and campaigns so powerful that his rivals (I was one) could only fight to keep up. “
He entered journalism in what was then the traditional way, taking his first job as a reporter for a weekly newspaper at age 16. Then he studied at Durham University.
After serving in the army and earning a master’s degree, Evans became an assistant editor at Manchester Evening News.
In 1961 he was appointed editor of the Northern Echo and first developed his reputation as a relentless journalist with campaigns against air pollution and a national program to detect cervical cancer, an initiative that still saves thousands of lives each year.
Evans became editor of the national weekly Sunday Times in 1967 and made it an example of investigative journalism, with reports from his Insight team.
In addition to the thalidomide story, the Sunday Times published in 1967 a decades-long denunciation of a high-ranking British intelligence officer, Kim Philby, as a Soviet spy, despite British government objections that the report would put in endangers national security.
When Murdoch bought the Times newspapers in 1981 from Thomson Corp, he installed Evans as editor of the Times, but the relationship quickly soured. Evans said the British government allowed Murdoch to buy the newspapers on the basis of promises he made to defend editorial independence. “He broke them all in one year,” Evans said in a 2013 Reuters interview.
He said his own writings on then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were the source of the break with Murdoch. “When he began to dismantle the British economy, the most compelling critic of that policy … was the Sunday Times,” he told the Independent. “I wrote 70% of that review myself. When I became editor of the Times, I continued to criticize monetarism. “Within a year, Evans was kicked out of the Times in what he called” the saddest moment of my life. “
Murdoch said he made the decision to avoid a staff rebellion and insisted that he had never tried to dictate newspaper policy.
In 1984, Evans and Brown moved to the United States, where he taught at Duke University in North Carolina and later held various positions at US News & World Report, Atlantic Monthly, and New York Daily News, among others.
In addition to his wife, Evans leaves behind his children Isabel, Georgie, Ruth, Michael and Kate Evans, his grandchildren Anna and Emily Vanderpool, and his brother Peter Evans. His first wife, Enid, whom he divorced in 1978, died in 2013.
