THE CPB: WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?

At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. (R-Conn.) offered a warm welcome to one of his constituents, William Lee Hanley Jr., the chairman of the Corp. for Public Broadcasting.

Weicker’s greeting was in stark contrast to his action nearly four years ago, when he exercised his senatorial privilege and blocked the Republican businessman’s nomination for a seat on CPB’s board of directors.

While Hanley was eventually confirmed for a seat on the board, he served only from February to March, 1984, before the board was reduced from 15 to 10 members, eliminating Hanley’s seat in the process. Later that year, the White House appointed him to fill the remaining term of another CPB board member who had resigned unexpectedly. “It’s bizarre,” he says. “I have never served a full term of any kind.”

Nor is it certain that he will. His term--along with those of two other board members--expires Thursday, and the White House has not yet renominated him, despite the fact the he is a Republican who headed the Connecticut Reagan-Bush committee in 1980.

That will bring to six the number of vacancies on the board of CPB, the nonprofit organization that oversees federal contributions to public radio and television.

The slowness of the White House personnel office to clear names for positions throughout the government will leave CPB without a chairman at a crucial time when it has no official president and is trying to rebuild itself from charges of disarray and politicization, controversies over its policies and the departure of several top-level executives.

“The most important ingredient that will be lacking is a diversity of viewpoint,” Hanley says of the board vacancies, adding that, unless something happens soon, the board might as well “meet in a phone booth.”

There are some concerns outside CPB that because there will be only four board members--Vice Chairman Howard Gutten, Kenneth Towery, Lloyd Kaiser and Daniel Brenner--their individual voices will carry greater weight in making important decisions.

The board did dispose of a major issue earlier this month when, with three vacancies, it unanimously voted down controversial “content analysis” proposals to evaluate the objectivity and balance in CBP-funded programming.

“I am committed to fair, objective and balanced programming,” says Hanley, who took over as chairman last November. “My personal feeling is that everybody will have a different view of what that is.”

But in the end, he says, the final decision of what programs the public sees “lies not with us but with the station managers at the local level. . . . They make their own choices. That’s the greatness of the system. It responds to local needs.”

A 47-year-old businessman with no previous broadcasting background, Hanley maintains that, while the large number of vacancies will slow the board, it will not be totally incapacitated.

Still, the six vacancies will mean a significant turnover in the makeup of the board. Former Chairman Sonia Landau left last year after announcing she would not seek another term. Sharon Rockefeller, another former chairman who often disagreed with Landau, leaves this week, as does Richard Brookhiser, who supported the content-analysis study.

To date, the White House has sent only two nominees to Congress to fill the CPB openings: Sheila Burke Tate, Nancy Reagan’s former press secretary, who is currently a public relations executive here, and former board member Harry O’Connor of Playa del Rey, Calif., who unsuccessfully challenged Landau for the chairmanship.

Meanwhile, CPB is still looking for a replacement for Martin Rubenstein, who unexpectedly resigned as president last November over disagreements with the board and Landau.

Rubenstein had been named in February, 1986, to replace Edward J. Pfister, who had made a highly publicized resignation in May, 1985, after the board voted to cancel CPB participation in a proposed visit by public-broadcasting representatives to the Soviet Union. Pfister complained that Landau and other board members had interjected politics into CPB business.

While his tenure at CPB’s helm has been brief, Hanley says he has tried to increase CPB’s rapport with public-broadcasting officials.

“I hate the word agenda ,” he says. Instead, he adds, “I’ve got some goals in which I would love to help CPB in what I perceive to be its leadership role in public broadcasting.”

A Yale graduate with a degree in economics, Hanley is chairman of Hanley Co., an oil exploration and merchant banking firm in New York City, and a partner in a political consulting firm here.

He recently started an independent video production company with award-winning TV documentary producer Anthony Potter. The company has produced segments for ABC’s “Our World” with Linda Ellerbee.

While the soft-spoken businessman from Connecticut seems to have diffused some of the public controversy that surrounded Landau, his outspoken, controversial predecessor, Hanley now finds himself at odds with the Reagan Administration over CPB’s budget.

The Administration has proposed cutting the $214 million already appropriated for CPB for fiscal 1988 by $44 million and reducing the fiscal 1989 appropriation of $228 million by $88 million, and then to use those cuts to fund CPB’s 1990 budget.

When Hanley refused to support the Administration’s plan, he recalls, the Office of Management and Budget criticized him for not being a team player.

“What we’re dealing with is a commitment that has already been made,” says Hanley.

To ensure time for planning and production, CPB funds are appropriated by Congress two years ahead of the fiscal year in which they are to be spent. While federal funds comprise only 17% of total public broadcasting funding, they provide the seed money to leverage additional private and foundation support, Hanley says.

His recent testimony on CPB’s budget will be his last appearance on Capitol Hill until the White House officially submits his name.

Whatever the outcome, he notes with a laugh that he is assured a permanent legacy in the nation’s capital: He once owned a clay-products company that supplied the bricks for a number of large buildings here.