Ira M. Millstein, corporate lawyer with public impact, dies at age 97
Ira M. Millstein, a venerable lawyer who campaigned for greater independence by corporate boards, invoked his bipartisan bona fides to push Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the federal bench, and vigilantly helped New York City in the mid-1970s avoid bankruptcy. died Wednesday at his home in Mamaroneck, NY. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Elizabeth Millstein Tremain.
Mr. Millstein trained as an engineer at Columbia before switching to the legal profession and was respected for his conscientiousness and tact. He became a senior partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a New York-based law firm, where he specialized in antitrust law and government regulation. As a member of the firm, he was called in to untangle corporate governance confusion at Bethlehem Steel, the Walt Disney Company, General Electric, General Motors, Macy’s, Tyco International and Westinghouse, among others.
“All of our icons lost out to foreign competition and were subject to takeovers,” he told The New York Times in 2006, as he pushed for greater oversight of New York’s myriad public authorities. ‘Where were the shelves? Inactive.”
Throughout his career, Mr. Millstein has pushed for more aggressive corporate governance by private sector executives. “The evolution of drivers is essential to keep our system free from further intrusive regulation,” he said in an interview at Strategy+business magazine in 2005. He further expounded his views in a book, “The Activist Director: Lessons From the Boardroom and the Future of the Corporation,” published in 2016.
He was also recruited for social leadership roles that were beyond the reach of politically hobbled government bureaucracies.
He served as chairman of the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy from 1991 to 1999. He was chosen to lead Governor George E. Pataki’s New York State Commission on Public Authority Reform, which streamlined and enlightened hundreds of quasi-independent agencies. And he headed a special mayoral commission charged with investigating the 1977 blackout that virtually paralyzed New York. The panel concluded that the outage was caused by Consolidated Edison’s poor management and recommended lowering the utility’s rates if it was not providing adequate service.
Mr. Millstein expressed support for Ruth Bader Ginsburg during Senate hearings on her nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1993, noting in 1993 his testimony that he had known both her and her husband, Martin Ginsberg, since 1957, when Mr. Ginsburg was a summer associate at Weil. He recalled President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 nomination of Judge Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which he said was languishing and probably dead.
“The opposition to Ruth was largely based on the claim that she was a single-issue lawyer – women’s rights,” Mr. Millstein testified. A lifelong Democrat, he contacted an old acquaintance, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and requested an audience so that Mr. Hatch could “make a decision based on the evidence, not on based on gossip and rumours’. he said.
“The senator apparently concluded that Ruth Ginsburg was indeed a legal scholar of no ideological school,” Mr. Millstein said. “The opposition seemed to have melted away after that. And Ruth was confirmed and on her way to today.
In October 1975, as New York City faced a crippling budget crisis, Mr. Millstein advised city officials not to file for bankruptcy and instead helped draft a formal petition testifying to the government’s default. local authority. The petition, signed by Mayor Abraham D. Beame, was ready to be served on the banks that were the city’s main creditors, and was accompanied by a press release that pointedly shifted responsibility.
“I have been advised by the inspector,” the mayor said in the press release: that the city “does not have sufficient cash on hand to meet debts owed today.”
At the last minute, municipal unions dipped into their pension funds to save the city, and the signed petition was never appealed. For years it hung framed in Mr. Millstein’s law office on Fifth Avenue.
In “The Activist Director,” Mr. Millstein described the city’s budget crisis as “one of the worst examples of poor corporate governance oversight that I have seen.”
He also wrote that he was one of three Beame confidantes approached by Governor Hugh L. Carey to persuade the mayor to resign. They refused out of personal loyalty to Mr. Beame.
Ira Martin Millstein was born on November 8, 1926 in Manhattan to Harry and Birdie (Rosenbaum) Millstein. His father was a furniture salesman; his mother ran the household.
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, he received a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University School of Engineering in 1946.
But engineering wasn’t for Mr. Millstein, and the assistant dean of Columbia Law School, who taught an undergraduate law course for engineers, steered him toward a legal career. Mr. Millstein graduated from law school in 1949.
He later served as the founder and chairman of the Millstein Center in Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School.
After serving briefly as Special Assistant to the United States Attorney General in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, he joined Weil, Gotshal & Manges in 1951. In 1999 he gave up day-to-day management of the company, but never retired.
In 1949 he married Diane Greenberg; she died in 2010. In addition to his daughter Elizabeth, he is survived by a son, James E. Millstein, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Both his children are lawyers. Two sisters, Lucille M. Etra and Marcia M. Miller, died. His marriage to Susan Marie Frame in 2013 ended in divorce
Mr. Millstein’s civic roles included chairman of the New York Governor’s Task Force on Pension Fund Investment, during which he urged the state to use its assets more aggressively in public and corporate policy. He was also an advisor to the Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs. As chairman of the Central Park Conservancy, he called for local property owners to be given the power to tax themselves to support their neighborhood parks.
Describing his role in New York City’s budget crisis as “pro bono, official kibitzer,” Mr. Millstein recalled in an interview for this obituary in 2021 that on the night the city nearly declared bankruptcy, he walked out of his Midtown office rushed to Gracie Mansion. , the mayor’s home, when he was stopped by a man who demanded his wallet. When he opened it to show that he had only ten dollars, the man said, “Well, I’ll take that.”
“I said, ‘Look, I’m on my way back to meet with the mayor,’” Mr. Millstein recalled. ‘The city is in big trouble. You have to let me take my car away, and that’s the only ten dollars I have.” He let me go, so I went to the garage, got the car and went back to Gracie Mansion. Where else could something like this happen than New York City?”