The New Head Man at CBS News

The next president of CBS News liked Dan Rather’s unscripted speech in the incumbent’s office.

David W. Burke, who was named this week to succeed Howard Stringer on Aug. 1, knew that the announcement had taken the network news world by surprise. Here was Burke, executive vice president of ABC News, second in command and confidant to ABC News President Roone Arledge, becoming the first person in CBS history to be tapped for that high office who had not been part of CBS.

He was the perceived outsider--coming in after two insider books detailing the troubles and tribulations of the network and its embattled news division that provoked a rash of attention on the house of Edward R. Murrow. Only the week before, TV Guide had asked on its cover, “Is CBS Still the Tiffany of Network News?”

So after the press conferences Wednesday and the introductions to network affiliates, there was a reception for Burke in Stringer’s office, where anchorman Rather spoke.

“I don’t feel like an insider and Dan made it clear to me that I am not-- as many others have,” Burke said in a telephone interview from his home in New York’s Westchester County Thursday night. “Dan said to a small group of people that he doesn’t want to hear any talk about my being an outsider, because a person who loves the news as I do, and a person who is as serious about it (as I am), is one of them.

“Dan was very supportive and very kind; Walter Cronkite has been very supportive and very kind,” Burke added, like a politician making sure to thank everyone. “Dick Salant (a former CBS News President) was very kind.”

Actually, the 52-year-old Burke was much more the outsider in 1977 when he began at ABC News after a career primarily in government and politics--first as legislative aide and then administrative assistant to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) from 1965 to 1971, and as chief of staff to New York Gov. Hugh Carey from 1975 to 1977. In between, Burke had been a vice president at the Dreyfus Fund.

The son of a Brookline, Mass., policeman, Burke has always preferred to operate behind the scenes, leaving the fanfare and the glory to others. He resists personality profiles and photographs. To this day he is not listed in Who’s Who in America.

Despite the former position, there are sparse mentions of him in the Kennedy books, but Burton Hersch wrote in his 1972 book “The Education of Edward Kennedy”: “In marble Washington, where power is sunlight, David Burke is a toad of integrity among butterflies.”

Burke graduated from Tufts University in 1957, then took a job as a laborer for Lever Bros., loading freight cars, making soap, cleaning out vats. He had dreams of becoming a labor leader in the mold of Walter P. Reuther of the United Auto Workers.

But the Lever plant closed, and Burke studied labor economics for a year at Chicago Business School and got his master’s degree. Then he went to Washington.

From 1961 to 1965, Burke served as assistant to Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges and Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and was executive secretary of Johnson’s advisory committee on labor-management policy.

He said in a 1974 interview: “The world is full of extraordinary people who, because they lack some extraordinary thing, are never diffentiated from the rest. My differentiation was the fact that I worked for Sen. Kennedy.”

Asked how journalism compares to politics, Burke said Thursday, “The comparison is a simple one: It is the kind of work that keeps you at a metabolism level that I find I need to exist. And it also has the same sense of public purpose, so I’m comfortable with it.”

Burke has been married to the former Beatrice (Trixie) Pollock since 1959, and they have four sons and a daughter.

Now that he is going to CBS, Burke keeps his confidences as he always has.

Asked about potential changes at CBS, Burke noted that “as I’ve told everyone who’s asked me that question, it’s more than premature for me to say I have some kind of a plan and some kind of a strategy, and so on. That would be pure nonsense for me to say that. It would also not be true. I don’t come with strategies or a plan. I come with me. All I’m bringing is me.”

However, Burke was firm in his support of Rather. Asked if he had any intention of bringing in a woman anchor at some point, or a co-anchor, Burke replied: “I don’t have thoughts about that, and certainly I don’t have any thoughts about any kind of co-anchoring with Dan Rather. No thoughts,” he repeated, “at all.”

Burke said he has not read former CBS News President Ed Joyce’s “Prime Times, Bad Times” or journalist Peter J. Boyer’s “Who Killed CBS? The Undoing of America’s Number One News Network,” and he has no intention of doing so. He did read an excerpt of Joyce’s book in Manhattan Inc. with “some interest” before he got the CBS job, “because it was a magazine I happen to subscribe to; it came to my home.

“But that past is behind them (CBS)--I hope it is,” Burke said.

Burke worked briefly at ABC Thursday gathering papers together and saying goodby. He said the reaction at ABC was “a mix. I have many friends there, and many people have told me they were extraordinarily pleased. And some people feel they’ve lost a good friend. Roone has even said publicly it’s like he’s lost a brother.”

Burke met with Arledge last weekend at ABC to tell him of the new post.

Asked why he made the change, Burke, who is going from second in command to the person in charge, said simply: “I was considered for it, and took that as an enormous compliment, and finally it was offered to me, which is . . . it’s an honor, something that I had to make a tough decision about.”

In the shakeup at CBS headquarters, Stringer succeeds Gene Jankowski as president of the CBS Broadcast Group, overseeing the entertainment, news, sports, stations and other broadcast operations, while Jankowski becomes chairman of the Broadcast Group.

Asked whether he now intends to bring some ABC stars to CBS, Burke dismissed that by saying, “I have no great plans.”

Does he carry any secrets with him?

“I don’t know about secrets,” Burke replied. “The one thing you have to preserve all the time is your repuation--as someone who wouldn’t do something that would be considered untoward. Someone asked me in a press conference about some ideas I may have had about programming and so on and so forth, and I said I find it very hard when I have ideas that I seem to like to lose them. And so physically, if I’m going over, I guess they’re in my kit bag someplace, and they come with me.”

Because he technically is between jobs, Burke will sit out next week’s Democratic National Convention with his family on Cape Cod.

“Howard Stringer is still the president of CBS News until Aug. 1,” Burke said firmly.

In a sense he has a foot at each network--or at neither.

“People are hard at work at both organizations,” Burke said, “and I have no wish . . . I don’t see myself, no, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to go. If you don’t know where to put your feet, it’s best to put them on Cape Cod.”