ANALYSIS : At ABC, They Called David Burke ‘<i> Consigliere’</i>

An Irish pol from Boston for president of CBS News? It sounds incongruous on the face of it, but the qualities that David W. Burke, the executive vice president of ABC News, brings to the job should be welcome at CBS.

He is a tough, cunning administrator who learned to play hardball first with the Kennedys, then as chief of staff to former New York Gov. Hugh Carey.

As ABC News President Roone Arledge’s aide-de-camp, Burke got stuck with so much of the dirty work that people used to call him the “the consigliere. “ But he kept the trains running on time, and unlike many news executives, he was known for playing straight with people.

“If he’s going to stab you, he’ll stab you in the front,” says one senior ABC producer.

Like most Irish pols, Burke values loyalty above all else; according to this code, you don’t wash your dirty linen in public. All of the network news departments have been buffeted by hostile outside forces in recent years--shrinking audiences, declining revenues and rebellious affiliates--but the turmoil at CBS News has been partly self-inflicted.

The various factions, including Cronkite loyalists, Ratherites, the gang at “60 Minutes” and the remnants of Murrow’s followers, went at each other’s throats with such ferocity, they gave the press a field day.

As Bill Sheehan, a former president of ABC News, observes, “Burke’s biggest job will be to keep that cage of animals calmed down. The troops there did themselves a lot of harm when they turned so publicly on management, making themselves such an appealing story that it kept the internal politics boiling.”

Burke talks to the press too, but he can be expected to take a cooler approach than some of his predecessors who were more available to reporters than they were to their own employees. At ABC, he was instrumental in avoiding the negative publicity that surrounded the layoffs at CBS.

Knowing that cuts were inevitable after the Cap Cities takeover of ABC, he and Arledge came up with their own plan for down-sizing, including generous severance allowances and help in finding new jobs. People were not laid off en masse, and unlike their counterparts at CBS, they did not learn they were out of work by reading the newspaper.

Burke is not a glad-hander; he is the guy who always stayed in the background and let his bosses shine. But his habits from political days served him well at ABC. Before an affiliates meeting, for example, he would have an aide compile a briefing book about all the executives he would be meeting--the state of their news operations, their marketing problems, etc.

This may sound the rational thing to do, but most news executives started life as journalists and continue to operate by the seat of their pants, happy to survive from crisis to crisis.

Burke has yet to prove he has a flair for programming; although he ran ABC News on a day-to-day basis, only Arledge had the authority to sign off on new program ideas. It also remains to be seen whether Burke will prove successful at defending the news division from corporate pressures. He is pragmatic enough to know that the gravy days are gone for good, but it seems unlikely that he has gone to CBS to participate in the further dismantling of an institution that can still rise to greatness on occasion.

On a personal level, he tends to gravitate toward stories of substance. “On ‘Nightline,’ he would call with stories he thought we should do,” says ‘Nightline’ executive producer Rick Kaplan. “Invariably they were important, but they were usually dull as hell.”

But CBS president Laurence Tisch hasn’t hired Burke to tend the shrine of Edward R. Murrow. He has been brought in to see the news division through increasingly tough fiscal times and to bring a little order and stability to a war-torn institution. It won’t be easy, but Burke’s training as an old political street fighter should help.