Decisions And Opinions Of Former Editor, Sir Harold Evans, Explored

Sir Harold Evans, 76, has a few secrets to keeping fit and spry. Leaving aside having a younger wife, Tina Brown, and two teenage children, there are his regular table-tennis tournaments with a friend in the basement of his apartment building on East 57th Street in Manhattan, and his visits to a nearby pool, where he practises distance swimming. But his most potent elixir, surely, is his determination to stay busy.

The morning I arrive at his home, which has the feel of a swanky townhouse rather than an apartment, Harry is dressed in scruffy track trousers and a blue polo-neck. He beckons me into the library, where proofs of the coming issue of Parade, a Sunday supplement carried by newspapers nationwide and read by 90 million people, are spread all over the table. The uncorrected pages carry excerpts from his latest book, due out in the US next week and also reworked as a three-part television series, They Made America.

To most people in Britain, Evans will always be the newspaper genius who turned The Sunday Times into an unassailable bastion of investigative reporting during his tenure as its editor from 1967 to 1981, followed by his one-year stint as the editor of The Times until his famous falling- out with its then brand-new proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. When he was knighted in June, it was for his services to journalism.

But in America, where he has lived for 20 years, Evans has carved out a new legacy. Subsequent to his arrival here, there were periods as executive editor at Atlantic Monthly Press and then at the weekly magazine US News and World Report. From there, he went on to serve as publisher at Random House for seven years until 1997. On leaving, he found his newest vocation - as a historian.

They Made America, published in the US by Little, Brown, is a colourful compendium in words and pictures of the lives of America's most important inventors and innovators, from Edison to Ford. The book is the second in a trilogy. The first, The American Century, was a best-seller. It covered the country's political history from 1889 to the millennium. Now that the innovators book is done - and it took Evans five years - he intends to begin a third tome, covering American politics from 1789 to 1889.

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Campaigning journalism, of course, is what Evans is best remembered for. It was on his watch that The Sunday Times launched its unrelenting assault on the makers of thalidomide in 1973, which resulted in the pregnancy drug, which caused malformations in some babies, to be taken off the market.

If Evans were in charge of an American paper now, he knows the first thing he would be doing - he would have launched a campaign, and the subject would have been compensation for the troops being shot in Iraq."Some months ago, I would have had a big investigation and probably a campaign, depending on what facts we found exactly, about what a guy gets when he comes back from Iraq without an arm, a leg or an eye. I would have taken the thalidomide standard. What is it for a lifetime of pain and suffering that they are going to get, when you have given this heroic sacrifice? I've not seen that anywhere. That's the kind of thing that turns me on to becoming a newspaper editor again - for God's sake, go and investigate this."

The thing about the thalidomide campaign, Evans says, is that he made sure his reporters got all the facts nailed down hard first."We felt rock solid in our convictions and we were utterly prepared to have them assailed."

[Editor's Note: Below is a chronicle of important events in Evans' professional career.]

Evans moved to The Sunday Times in 1966 and became editor the following year. During the next 14 years he revolutionised British journalism, making The Sunday Times internationally famous for its crusading investigations.

The most famous campaign under Evans' editorship was exposing a scandal that had left hundreds of British children with birth defects, with no compensation. Evans fought a long legal battle with Distillers, which manufactured Thalidomide; winning at the European Court of Human Rights.

Under Evans, The Sunday Times uncovered Kim Philby's role as a Soviet spy and published the controversial diaries of the former Labour minister Richard Crossman.

Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of Times Newspapers in 1981 led to Evans being made editor of The Times. He lasted only a year, leaving to become a director of Goldcrest Films and Television.

Evans moved to America in 1984, teaching at Duke University and becoming editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly Press. He was appointed president and publisher of Random House in 1990. Between 1997 and 2000 he was the editorial director and vice-chairman of US News and World Report, the New York Daily News and The Atlantic Monthly.