Harold Evans

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Sir Harold Matthew Evans (born 28 June 1928) is a British-American journalist and writer who was editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. In 1984 he moved to the United States, where he had leading positions in journalism with U.S. News & World Report, The Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Daily News.

In 1986 he founded Condé Nast Traveler.

He has written various books on history and journalism, with his The American Century (1998) receiving particular acclaim.

In 2000, he retired from leadership positions in journalism to spend more time on his writing.

Since 2001, Evans has served as editor-at-large of The Week magazine and, since 2005, he has been a contributor to The Guardian and BBC Radio 4.

Evans was invested as a Knight Bachelor in 2004, for services to journalism.

On 13 June 2011, Evans was appointed editor-at-large of the Reuters news agency.

Early life and education

Evans, the eldest of four sons, was born at 39 Renshaw Street, Patricroft, Eccles, to Welsh parents, Frederick and Mary Evans (née Haselum), whom he described in his 2009 memoir as "the self-consciously respectable working class". His father was an engine driver, while his mother ran a shop in their front room to enable the family to buy a car. He failed the eleven-plus, needed to gain entry to grammar schools, and attended St Mary's central school in Manchester and a business school for a year to learn shorthand, a requirement to become a journalist.

Personal life and death

In 1953, Evans married fellow Durham graduate Enid Parker, with whom he had a son and two daughters; the marriage was dissolved in 1978. The couple remained on good terms; Enid Evans died in 2013. In 1973, Evans met Tina Brown, a journalist 25 years his junior. In 1974, she was given freelance assignments with The Sunday Times in the UK, and in the U.S. by its Colour magazine. When a sexual affair emerged between the married Evans and Brown, she resigned and joined the rival The Sunday Telegraph. On 20 August 1981, Evans and Brown married at Grey Gardens, in East Hampton, New York, the home of Ben Bradlee, then The Washington Post executive editor, and Sally Quinn. Evans and Brown had a son and daughter.

Evans died in New York City on 23 September 2020 at the age of 92. His death was reported by his family and the cause of death given as congestive heart failure.

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Career

Evans began working as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, at the age of 16. During his national service in the Royal Air Force (1946-1949), he completed an intelligence test to become an officer but did not hear anything more and served as a clerk. After contacting every one of the fourteen universities in the United Kingdom at the time, he entered University College, Durham University. Palatinate, the university's independent newspaper, while a student, was edited by him. He graduated in 1952 after studying economics and politics.

Following his appointment as a sub-editor on the Manchester Evening News, the International Press Institute selected him to study newspaper design in India. Evans received a Harkness Fellowship in 1956-1957 to travel and study in the United States, and spent time at the Universities of Chicago and Stanford. He became an assistant editor on the Manchester Evening News after returning to the United Kingdom. Nicholas Lemann said he "joined a long line of British journalists" who did similar research, from Alistair Cooke to Andrew Sullivan. In 1961, Evans was appointed editor of The Northern Echo, a regional newspaper. When he was at the Darlington title, he advocated for cervical smear tests to become more widely available and a pardon for Timothy Evans, who was wrongly arrested and jailed for murders in Notting Hill, London. The Northern Echo was able to show that there had been a miscarriage of justice.

Harold Evans, a 1966 graduate of the University of London, went to London to become assistant to The Sunday Times' editor. The Thomson Company's founders bought The Times just over a year after, and Evans' editor Denis Hamilton was promoted to editor-in-chief of the Times group. Evans was recommended to serve as the next editor of The Sunday Times by a reporter.

In 1967, Evans became editor of The Sunday Times. Kim Philby's discovery in that year as a member of the Cambridge Spy Ring who had been involved in spying on behalf of Russia began early on, during his tenure as editor. Previously it had been assumed that Philby was a low-level diplomat at the time he escaped to Moscow in 1963, but in fact, he was in charge of anti-Soviet intelligence and the chief officer in charge of tracking CIA contacts. Evans was warned that the revelations jeopardize national security, and he was sent by a D-notice warning that he should not publish at the start of September. Despite this, he went ahead with publication, claiming that the D-notice had been sent to inoculate the government against bad press rather than safeguarding the country's security. The official complaint was eventually dismissed.

Thymide, a drug that was used to expectant mothers suffering from morning sickness, was a long-running problem during his tenure, resulting in the deaths of thousands of children in the United Kingdom due to deformed limbs. They had not received compensation from the drug manufacturers, who were the Distillers Company in the United Kingdom. Insight's investigative team drafted Phillip Knightley to lead the probe, which he orchestrated. Evans took on the drug firms responsible for the manufacture of thalidomide, defending them through the English courts and eventually winning in the European Court of Human Rights in 1979. The British government was obliged to amend the statute out of contempt of court, which had prohibited the reporting of civil cases. Although it was legal for the newspaper to run, journalists were not allowed to publish its factual information. Following the European Court's decision, the British media was now free to cover such incidents without fear. As a result of Evans' Sunday Times campaign, the families of thalidomide victims received $32.5 million. Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime appeared in 2016 in a documentary about Evans and the thalidomide campaign.

In 1974, the British government attempted to prevent Evans from publishing extracts from former Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman's diaries, shortly after Crossman's death and ahead of the diaries' publication in book form. Evans was charged with breaching the Twenty-year statute that barred disclosures of government information from being disclosed. Lord Chief Justice Widgery found that publication would not be contrary to the public interest.

When Rupert Murdoch bought Times Newspapers Limited in 1981, he named Evans as editor of The Times. He remained with the paper for only a year, during which The Times was critical of Margaret Thatcher. In the first six months of Murdoch's takeover, over 50 journalists resigned, a number of whom were known to dislike Evans. Despite the newspaper's increasing in circulation, a group of writers called on Evans to resign in March 1982, alleging that he had supervised an "erosion of editorial values." Evans resigned immediately after, citing policy differences with Murdoch in relation to editorial autonomy. In his book Good Times, Bad Times (1984), Evans gives an account of the incident. "I am the first one I come across on him socially in New York" Evans wrote of Murdoch: "I find I am without any residual emotional hostility." "Lucfer is the most arresting character in Milton's Paradise Lost," I have to remind myself.

Evans took over The Times as the head of Goldcrest Films and Television.

Evans, who graduated from Duke University in North Carolina and Yale University in 1984, migrated to the United States, where he taught at Duke University in North Carolina and Yale University. He was named editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly Press and later became the editorial director of U.S. News & World Report and spent time at The New York Daily News. He was the founding editor of Conde Nast Traveler in 1986; unlike other publications, employees were not eligible to receive any free travel or hospitality from the organizations they wrote about. From 1990 to 1997, Evans served as president and editor of Random House. William Styron, Calvin Trillin, Neil Sheehan, Gail Sheehy, Edmund Morris, Shelby Foote, Maya Angelou, and Shana Alexander were among the authors he edited. By Barack Obama, he obtained rights to Dreams from My Father's book, which was followed by him at the start of his political career. "We know this," Gail Sheehy wrote about his time with Evans and how he was known for his cryptic remarks penciled on the manuscript.

Evans served as editor editor and vice chairman of U.S. News & World Report and The Atlantic Monthly from 1997 to January 2000, when he resigned. In 1998, his book The American Century was published. They Made America (2004) chronicled the lives of some of the country's most influential inventers and innovators. Fortune named it as one of the best books in the 75 years that the magazine has been published. The book was released as a four-part television mini-series the same year and as a National Public Radio special in the United States in 2005.

In 1993, Evans became a naturalized United States citizen. He became the editor-at-large at Reuters on June 13, 2011.

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