Navy’s First Lady, Always and Forever

It is difficult in an era racked by issues of character to convey adequately the loss to the Navy and to the nation of a tiny, sweet-faced, steel-spirited woman named Roberta Gorsuch Burke. But then nothing about Bobbie Burke, who died July 4 at 98, was ever simple except her vision of what was right.

She would always refer to herself as “just a simple Navy wife” in such a self-deprecating way that few would ever guess she was the 72-year partner of Adm. Arleigh “31-Knot” Burke, World War II hero and three-time chief of Naval Operations.

President Clinton held her arm particularly tightly at her husband’s funeral last year and made one of the most moving speeches of his career.

The Burkes were married in the Naval Academy Chapel in Annapolis on the day of his graduation, June 7, 1923. That she became a warrior’s bride should have been ironic. She was the gentlest and most devout of Christian Scientists, a spiritual as well as physical counterpoint to her bear-size husband’s quarterdeck zeal. But theirs was one of the century’s great and enduring love stories. They met on a blind date in Annapolis, experienced mutual and eternal bewitchment and were still flirting shamelessly more than 70 years into their marriage.

Burke used to declare in mock indignation that his 5-foot, 95-pound wife was a merciless tyrant.

“But everything I ever accomplished I owe to Bob,” he often told friends, with something like reverence. “Choosing the right woman is the greatest single factor in determining the outcome of a man’s life. There aren’t any lessons on how to do it, and many people do it wrong. I just got lucky.”

Marriage was rarely easy for her. The couple never had children, and she found domestic duties far more chore than fulfillment. An accomplished violinist, pianist and writer, she often said she would have loved to be a poet or novelist, “if I hadn’t married Arleigh.”

Like many Annapolis brides of her day, she considered Navy wifehood a vocation. She followed her husband’s ships 25 times from coast to coast and threw herself into Red Cross work and counseling young Navy wives on handling the strain of long separations and pittance pay.

The appointment to chief of naval operations brought with it residence in Admiral’s House, where the vice president now lives. Bobbie Burke made the house a focal point of political and diplomatic Washington, throwing it open to visitors, staging huge formal dinners and giving receptions that could mushroom to 1,500 people.

Yet through it all she remained uniquely Bobbie Burke, the self-described “skinny little girl from Lawrence, Kan.”

When the Burkes drove to Annapolis to swear in his successor as CNO, they arrived in his official chauffeur-driven Imperial limousine. They left in their own beat-up 7-year-old Plymouth, which ran out of gas on the way home. When they got to their new house, the beds hadn’t arrived, so they slept on the floor.

Those who knew her best were convinced Bobbie Burke had arranged for both those things to happen, a possibility she mischievously declined to confirm or deny.

“I thought it very useful for Arleigh to understand right away,” she said, “that when it’s over, it’s over.”