Jeremiah Milbank Jr., R.I.P.

WHEN the need for such a magazine as this one crystallized, General Eisenhower was president and his reelection was presumed. But there was dissatisfaction with the substance of Republican-establishment thought, which was dismissed by many as jejune and opportunistic, and there was a perceived need for a conservative alternative. If memory serves, the very first person I called upon to give a little corporate substance to National Review, Inc., was Jeremiah Milbank Jr.

The reason for this was in part personal. He had graduated from Yale with my brother John, and the friendship endured. Besides that, Jerry lived in Greenwich, Conn., and thus was my near neighbor. But never mind proximity, there was also the matter of his reputation. He was a conservative, which was what mattered, and also a philanthropist, in the tradition of his father and grandfather--but he kept his own company.

He lived with his enchanting, slightly zany wife, Andrea, and their four children, and he was active in various charitable enterprises, notably the International Center for the Disabled, which his father founded in 1917. But his generosity, however endlessly expressed, was not going to take over his life, and he also persevered with his family business in New York. He was an unabashedly forthright conservative but a conventional citizen who cultivated his longtime attachment to the Republican party. He eventually became the chairman of the Republican National Finance Committee. Though he would express his misgivings about GOP policy, he never turned his back on the Republican establishment, so that when he was asked to help NATIONAL REVIEW get launched, he was cooperative without endorsing the kind of political singlemindedness more natural to his juniors.

He was a steadfast friend of this journal, on which he never made or even intimated demands of his own for institutional conformism. Although he opposed any idea of a third party, he managed to back third-party incursions, including James Buckley for senator and WFB for mayor, with discreet but effective encouragement. He viewed with quiet amusement some of the paradoxes with which, as a GOP conservative, he was required to live. But there can never have been anywhere a citizen of this country prouder of its legacy or more greatly determined to enhance it.

Jerry Milbank energetically and selflessly befriended the conservative alternative, in life and in politics. He lived modestly in several houses in Greenwich and nearby Rye, N.Y., until his retreat to Charlottesville, Va., where he died early in August, at age 87, stellar as a citizen, a father, a friend. To the evolution of this enterprise he was critical. We join his family and friends in mourning his death and acclaiming his devotion to the country that bred him, and that merited even his high standards of generosity and concern.