Christian Alexander Herter, Jr.

Christian A. Herter Jr. was a lawyer and longtime public servant who in the 1960s was the first chairman of the New York Urban Coalition.

Herter was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 29, 1919, and reared in Boston. His father, Christian A. Herter Sr., was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a Republican from Massachusetts in 1942, and in 1953 was elected governor of Massachusetts. In 1959, the elder Herter became secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. His mother, the former Mary Caroline Pratt, was a granddaughter of Charles A. Pratt, a partner in Standard Oil of New Jersey and the founder of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

He received bachelor's and law degrees from Harvard. In World War II, he was an Army officer in Europe, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, among other commendations. In 1950, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives; he was re-elected two years later but stepped down after his father became governor.

In 1967, Herter, then a vice president of the Mobil Oil Corporation, was appointed by Mayor John V. Lindsay as one of the inaugural members of the Urban Coalition, a group of business, labor and neighborhood leaders created to aid the city's slums. Herter was the coalition's chairman until 1969.

Later, he taught environmental law at the University of New Mexico and international law at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan appointed him deputy United States commissioner on the International Whaling Commission.