One nephew, Stephen Burke, is the senior executive vice president of Comcast and chairman of NBCUniversal.

[12] As a child, Burke collected and sold daffodils found near his Albany home—afraid that they "were going to waste"—and offered a portion of the profits to the field owner.

[15] After being educated at the Vincentian Institute, a rigorous Catholic high school in Albany,[14] Burke attended the College of the Holy Cross, where he was a member of the college's Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) program,[10] along with yearbook, band, and business clubs.

[16] During World War II, he served as an ensign in the United States Navy and commanded a landing craft tank (LCT) in the Pacific Theater.

[13] Many of Burke's classmates at Harvard also became prominent business leaders, including Thomas Murphy, chair and CEO of ABC.

"[15] But after being persuaded that the company would be more tolerant of risk-taking, Burke returned three weeks later, arriving as the new head of the department.

[22] On one occasion, he was called to the office of J&J CEO Robert Wood Johnson II: "I was full of bravado.

[24] Following his retirement, he was appointed the second chairman of the national nonprofit organization Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA), formed by a consortium of advertising professionals who ran a research-based media campaign to discourage teenage use of illegal drugs such as marijuana.

Fortune magazine named him as one of the ten greatest CEOs of all time and he had a membership in the National Business Hall of Fame.