Ira M. Millstein, a venerable lawyer who advocated for greater independence of corporate boards, invoked his bipartisan loyalty to promote Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the federal bench, and who helped New York City in the mid-1970s to avoid bankruptcy. died Wednesday at his home in Mamaroneck, NY. He was 97 years old.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Elizabeth Millstein Tremain.
Mr. Millstein trained as an engineer at Columbia University before entering law and was respected for his meticulousness and tact. He became a senior partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a New York-based law firm, where he specialized in antitrust and government regulation. As a member of the firm, he was tasked with unraveling corporate governance ambiguities 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 victims of takeovers,” he told The New York Times in 2006, as he also pushed for greater control of New York’s myriad public agencies. “Where were the boards? Inactive.”
Throughout his career, Mr. Millstein pushed for more aggressive corporate governance by directors in the private sector. “Director development is critical to keeping our system free from further intrusive regulations,” he said in a 2005 interview with Strategy+business magazine. He further explained his views in a book entitled The Activist Director: Lessons From the Boardroom. and the Future of the Company,” published in 2016.
He was also recruited for civic leadership positions that were out of reach of politically handicapped government bureaucracies.
From 1991 to 1999 he was chairman of the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy. He was chosen to lead Governor George E. Pataki’s New York State Commission on Public Authority Reform, which streamlined and illuminated hundreds of quasi-independent agencies. And he led a special mayoral commission tasked with investigating the 1977 blackout that virtually paralyzed New York City. The panel concluded that the power outage was due to Consolidated Edison’s poor management and recommended reducing the utility’s rates if it provided inadequate service.
Mr. Millstein expressed his support for Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the Senate hearings on her nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1993, noting in his testimony that he had known her and her husband, Martin Ginsberg, since 1957, when Mr. Ginsburg was there was a summer employee at Weil. He recalled President Jimmy Carter’s nomination of Judge Ginsburg to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in 1980, and he said the appointment was languishing and probably dead.
“The opposition to Ruth was largely based on the claim that she was a lawyer concerned with only one issue – 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 up his mind based on the evidence and not on gossip and rumor.” he said.
“The senator apparently concluded that Ruth Ginsburg was in fact a legal scholar with no ideological school,” Mr. Millstein said. “The opposition seemed to have melted away after that. And Ruth was confirmed and is on her way to this day.”
In October 1975, with New York City facing a crippling financial crisis, Mr. Millstein advised city officials not to declare bankruptcy and instead helped draft a formal petition declaring municipal default. The petition, signed by Mayor Abraham D. Beame, was ready to be delivered to the banks that were the city’s largest creditors and was accompanied by a press release that clearly shifted responsibility.
“The comptroller has informed me,” the mayor said in the news release, that the city “does not have sufficient cash to pay debts due today.”
At the last minute, municipal unions dipped into their pension funds to save the city, and the signed petition was never acted upon. For years it hung framed in Mr. Millstein’s law office on Fifth Avenue.
Throughout his career, Mr. Millstein pushed for more aggressive corporate governance by directors in the private sector, as he did in this 2016 book.Credit…Columbia Business School
In “The Activist Director,” Mr. Millstein described the city’s financial crisis as “one of the worst examples of poor corporate governance oversight I have ever seen.”
He also wrote that he was one of three Beame confidants approached by Gov. Hugh L. Carey in an attempt 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 earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University School of Engineering in 1946.
But engineering ultimately wasn’t for Mr. Millstein, and the associate dean of Columbia Law School, who taught an undergraduate law course for engineers, advised him to pursue a career in law. Mr. Millstein graduated from law school in 1949.
He later served as founding chair of the Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School.
After briefly working as a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General in the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, he joined Weil, Gotshal & Manges in 1951. In 1999, he gave up day-to-day management of the firm 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. His two children are lawyers. Two sisters, Lucille M. Etra and Marcia M. Miller, died. His marriage to Susan Marie Frame ended in divorce in 2013
Mr. Millstein’s civic engagements included chairing the New York Governor’s Task Force on Pension Fund Investments, where he pushed the state to use its assets more aggressively on public and corporate policy issues. He was also an advisor to the Business Roundtable, an organization of business leaders. As chairman of the Central Park Conservancy, he called for local property owners to be given the opportunity to raise taxes themselves to support their neighborhood parks.
Mr. Millstein described his role in New York City’s financial crisis as a “pro bono, official kibitzer” and recalled in an interview for this obituary in 2021 that he was on the night the city nearly went bankrupt Midtown office was rushing to Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence, when he was stopped by a man who demanded his wallet. When he opened it and showed he only had $10, the man said, “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 allow me to take my car out, and this is the only $10 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 but the city of New York?”
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2024-03-14 15:38:54
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