Whitney North Seymour Jr.

Whitney North Seymour Jr. (July 7, 1923 – June 29, 2019), known to friends as Mike Seymour, was an American politician and attorney from New York City.

Born to a prominent family, Seymour graduated from Princeton University and Yale Law School and served in the United States Army during World War II.

Seymour was born in Huntington, West Virginia, on July 7, 1923, the son of Whitney North Seymour (1901–1983) and Lola Vickers Seymour (d. 1975).

He grew up in the Manhattan borough of New York City, in a rowhouse in the Greenwich Village.

Seymour's father was a prominent attorney who served as assistant solicitor general during the Herbert Hoover administration.

Seymour's brother was academician Thaddeus Seymour.

Seymour graduated from the Kent School in Connecticut in 1941.

He joined the U.S. Army in 1943, serving as an artillery officer in the Pacific theater during World War II, and resigning in 1945 with the rank of captain.

After the war, Seymour attended college at Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude with a AB in 1947.

He then attended Yale Law School, earning a LLB degree in 1950.

Seymour joined the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in 1950; his father had been a longtime partner at the firm.

He was an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan from 1953 to 1956.

Seymour then returned to private practice before being appointed, three years later, as counsel to the State Commission on New York City Governmental Operations.

As a civic leader in New York, he served on a number of boards, and played an important role in the Municipal Art Society's push for passage of the city's 1965 Landmarks Law.

Seymour wrote three books and, in later life, co-wrote a one-act play that was performed off-Broadway.

He served in the New York State Senate from 1966 to 1968 and as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1970 to 1973.

As U.S. Attorney, Seymour prosecuted a number of high-profile organized crime and corruption cases.

Seymour was a member of the New York State Senate from 1966 to 1968, sitting in the 176th and 177th New York State Legislatures.

A moderate Republican, Seymour unsuccessfully sought a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1968, and unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 1982.

He was the Republican nominee for the United States House of Representatives in the New York's 17th congressional district in November 1968, running against Democrat Ed Koch in the "silk stocking" district.

In the Republican primary election, Seymour eked out a win against S. William Green, receiving 12,291 votes to Green's 10,851.

To maintain his nearly perfect record of attendance in the state Senate, Seymour also missed many opportunities to make campaign appearances during the primary campaign.

In the general election, Koch and Seymour differed more on matters of style than on issues of policy; Koch was an adept and indefatigable campaigner with a constant public presence, while the patrician Seymour disliked street politics.

Koch spoke about his record of engaging in protests and pickets (on causes such as support for the Delano grape strike and opposition to the Vietnam War) while Seymour that he had "never joined any kind of protest march or demonstration" except for a march to ban automobiles from Central Park.

Although he received the endorsement of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Seymour lost the race; Koch won with 48% of the vote (on both the Democratic and Liberal Party ballot lines), while Seymour received 45% of the vote and Conservative Party candidate Richard J. Callahan received 5.8% of the vote.

Seymour thus became the first Republican in three decades to lose the congressional election in the "silk stocking" district.

Realizing that continued environmental litigation would require a nationally organized, professionalized group of lawyers and scientists, Duggan, Seymour, and Sive obtained funding from the Ford Foundation and joined forces with Gus Speth and other recent Yale Law School graduates of the class of 1969 to form the NRDC, with John H. Adams as the group's first staff member, Duggan as its first chairman, and Seymour, Laurance Rockefeller, and others as board members.

Seymour co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmentalist group, in 1970.

In 1970, Seymour was among the group that co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and served on its board.

The NRDC's establishment was partially an outgrowth of the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission, the Storm King case, in which Seymour was involved.

The case centered on Con Ed's plan to build the world's largest hydroelectric facility at Storm King Mountain.

The proposed facility would pump vast amounts of water from the Hudson River to a reservoir, and release it through turbines to generate electricity at peak demand.

A dozen concerned citizens organized the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference in opposition to the project, citing its environmental impact, and the group, represented by Seymour, his law partner Stephen Duggan, and David Sive, sued the Federal Power Commission, and successfully achieved a ruling that groups such as Scenic Hudson and other environmentalist groups had standing to challenge the FPC's administrative rulings.

He was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1970 to 1973, replacing Robert Morgenthau.

As U.S. Attorney, Seymour and his criminal division chief, Harold Baer Jr., took action to reduce a large backlog of criminal cases in the Southern District.

As U.S. Attorney, Seymour also prosecuted New York City Police Department corruption and misconduct cases brought by the Knapp Commission.

Under Seymour, former Richard Nixon Cabinet members John N. Mitchell and Maurice H. Stans were indicted on charges of accepting illegal campaign contributions from fugitive Robert Vesco, but both were acquitted.

Seymour was an attorney for many years with the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, but left in the early 1980s to form a smaller law firm.

In 1986, he was appointed as independent counsel to investigate former Reagan White House official Michael Deaver, and successfully secured a perjury conviction the next year.

He died in 2019 at age 95.