|
 Evans died of congestive heart
failure in New York, according to his wife Tina
Brown.
A former editor of Britain's Sunday Times and,
at his death, Reuters editor-at-large, Evans put
a unique stamp on investigative journalism.
Championing causes either overlooked or denied,
he and his team uncovered human rights abuses
and political scandals, and advocated for clean
air policies.
One of his most famous investigations exposed
the plight of hundreds of British thalidomide
children who had never received any compensation
for their birth defects. Evans organized a
campaign to take on the drug companies
responsible for manufacturing the drug, 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 an interview
with the Independent 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 purchased 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 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).
He 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 publisher of Random
House from 1990 to 1997.
Under his leadership, Random House scored
various publishing successes, including the
best-selling "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 received one
of the highest honors of the British monarchy
when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth 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
editor-at-large, Evans moderated conversations
with global newsmakers in business and politics
who included Tony Blair, Mark Cuban, Al Gore,
John Kerry, Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis and
Satya Nadella.
"Harry Evans was an inspiration, not only as a
great journalist but as a great man. He had an
insatiable intellect, extraordinary tenacity,
high principle, and a generous heart," Stephen
J. Adler, Reuters editor-in-chief, said.
Evans also had a sense of humor.
"Editor-at-large means you're free to create as
much havoc as they will tolerate," Evans was
quoted as saying by the Financial Times.
"He was the inventor of team journalism. In the
editorial chair, he was a human dynamo and set
in motion such a stream of powerful stories and
campaigns that his rivals (I was one) could only
struggle to keep up," Donald Trelford, the
former editor of the Observer, wrote in a review
of Evans' memoir published in 2009 called, "My
Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times."
Harold Matthew Evans was born in Greater
Manchester, England, on June 28, 1928, the son
of a train driver.
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 He entered journalism in what
was then the traditional way, taking his first
reporting job at a weekly newspaper at age 16.
He went on to study at Durham University.
After serving in the military and earning a
master's degree, Evans 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 program to detect
cervical cancer, an initiative that still saves
thousands of lives each year.
Evans became editor of national weekly the
Sunday Times in 1967, and made it an exemplar of
investigative journalism, with reports from its
Insight team.
KIM PHILBY SPY CASE
In addition to helping win compensation for
Britons who suffered birth defects from
thalidomide, a drug taken for pregnancy
sickness, the Sunday Times published in 1967 an
expose of high-ranking 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 Times of London in 1981
from the Thomson Corp, he installed Evans as
editor of the Times but the relationship quickly
turned sour - and stayed that way. Evans said
the British government allowed Murdoch to buy
the Times newspapers on the strength of pledges
he made to uphold editorial independence.
"He broke them all within a year," Evans said in
a 2013 Reuters interview.
He said his own writings about then-Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher were the source of
the rift with Murdoch.
 "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 percent of that
criticism myself. When I became editor of the
Times, I continued to criticize monetarism."
Within a year, Evans was ousted from the Times
in what he called "the saddest moment of my
life." Murdoch said he made the move to avert a
staff rebellion and insisted he had never tried
to dictate newspaper policy.
That same year, Evans married Brown in New York.
The two had met in 1973 when she had been a
writer for the Sunday Times.
In 1984, Evans and Brown moved to the United
States, where he taught at Duke University in
North Carolina and later held various positions
with U.S. News & World Report, the Atlantic
Monthly and New York Daily News among others.
In London, Brown had edited The Tatler magazine.
In America, she became editor of Vanity Fair
magazine and later the New Yorker, before
co-founding the Daily Beast news website in
2008. Evans became a U.S. citizen in 1993 and
Brown followed suit in 2005.
In addition to his wife, Evans leaves his
children Isabel, Georgie, Ruth, Michael and Kate
Evans, grandchildren Anna and Emily Vanderpool,
and brother Peter Evans. His first wife, Enid,
from whom he was divorced in 1978, died in 2013.
Adler said: "I am so grateful Harry became my
mentor and friend, and all of us at Reuters are
blessed to have worked with him and learned from
him these past 10 years. His example will
continue to guide us."
(Writing and reporting by Bill Trott; Editing by
Diane Craft and Howard Goller)
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