By Shawn Zeller, Congressional Quarterly Weekly, June 25, 2007

25 Jun 2007 // Last week marked an end to a textbook sort of Washington career. Sheila Burke, one-time chief of staff for GOP Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, announced that she would be resigning her post as deputy director of the Smithsonian Institution, as scandal allegations continued to swirl around her former boss, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small, and dragged her down in their wake. Small, in turn, stepped down in March, after the group’s board of regents mounted two investigations into his lavish employment contract and alleged misuse of Smithsonian funds.

A former banker, Small fell out of Washington’s favor in a now-familiar saga of individual excesses indulged in conditions of minimum accountability. But Burke, who had been an 18-year veteran of the policy-making scene in Washington, came up the ladder of D.C. ambition in a strikingly different fashion. Hers seems to be the tale of a series of shifting career paths suddenly narrowed to the vanishing point.

And her abrupt departure from the official Washington scene seems to have left her a bit bewildered. “I am committed to public service; it’s how I’ve spent my life,” she said in a recent interview with Congressional Quarterly. “I’m not allowing this to shake my fundamental belief, but it is challenging and disappointing.” Burke continues to insist that she did nothing wrong in her capacity as Small’s senior aide. She did sit on the corporate board of insurer Chubb Corp., which had a $500,000 annual contract with the Smithsonian, but she says she played no role in engineering that deal. And she says she was not involved in Small’s expansive ransacking of the Smithsonian’s finances for his personal benefit.

“I had nothing to do with Larry’s activities or pay or compensation or anything else,” she said. “The impression is that I colluded, and that’s not factually true. I had no reason to know what was in his contract.” Still, she tendered her resignation with the noncommittal explanation that it was “in the best interest of the Institution” — meaning, in the often tacit language of Washington scandal-ese, that her close association with Small had turned her into a political liability that the Smithsonian could no longer afford.

Up From the Nursing Station
It was an oddly hushed coda to a career that gathered momentum under a heady onrush of acclaim. A registered nurse who had cut her teeth in health policy with the New York-based National Student Nurses’ Association, she came onto Dole’s Senate staff as a health policy aide in 1977. Moving quickly through the ranks, she became his chief of staff in 1986. When the Kansas senator again became majority leader in 1995, Burke soon earned a reputation as one of the most powerful and influential policy hands on the Hill. The New York Times magazine even ran a profile of Burke, a rare distinction indeed for a Hill staffer. Times writer Jason DeParle praised her “mastery of the details” of policymaking, while finding her personal manner “confident and disarmingly frank.” Her nickname was “the 101st senator.”

She also served as Dole’s senior campaign adviser when he became the GOP nominee for president in 1996. But the Dole campaign also plunged the career policy wonk into something of a political free-fire zone. Some GOP insiders were beginning to whisper that, rather than serving as an extra senator, she was “the Republican Hillary” — a sinister liberal presence in Dole’s inner circle, contorting his policy stands in leftward directions.

She denied all those insinuations, but they nonetheless marked “a very difficult period of time,” she said. “It was very personal, and one can’t help but be affected by what one reads and what one’s children read.”

The Road Not Taken
After Dole lost the 1996 contest against incumbent President Bill Clinton, Burke could have parlayed her wealth of inside knowledge about the legislative process into a lucrative lobbying gig, as several other members of the majority leader’s staff and Dole himself went on to do.

Instead, Burke opted for a deanship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she taught health policy and finance and served as the school’s chief administrative officer. As she tells it, this, too, was an extension of the mission that brought her to Washington in the first place. “It was an extraordinary opportunity to work with people who were committed to public service,” she said.

Still, she did honor one tradition of the departed Capitol Hill veteran: She lent her name to a number of corporate boards — and pulled down some generous honoraria for doing so. By 1997, she’d signed on as a paid director with Chubb and WellPoint Health Networks Inc. Yet she also balanced these bill-paying posts with unpaid board memberships at nonprofit concerns such as her alma mater, the University of San Francisco.

Burke says that the nonprofit affiliations helped her maintain the “enormously engaging” connection to public-sector issues that fueled her tenure on Capitol Hill. And she kept taking on more nonprofit side gigs even though there was little or no money in them. Over the course of her Smithsonian tenure, she estimates, she served on a dozen or so nonprofit and university boards.

D.C. Redux
By 2000, however, Washington again beckoned. Lawrence Small, who had met Burke on the Chubb Group board of directors, had recently left his post as president of Fannie Mae to become Smithsonian secretary. In February 2000, he convinced Burke to join him, as the institution’s undersecretary for American museums.

It was a high-profile post — with a salary to match. By the time she resigned last week, Burke was making $400,000 a year — a far cry from the estimated $915,698 in salary, housing allowances and other perquisites that Small reeled in but certainly at the upper end of the government pay scale. She went quickly through the Smithsonian ranks as well, moving into the deputy’s chair in 2004.

But the independent panel examining Small’s tenure at the institution alleges that Burke, like Small, spent much time away from the workplace — 400 days between 2000 and 2006.

Much of that time went to her nonprofit board work, as well as a pro bono lectureship at the Kennedy school. She also kept up her board memberships at Chubb and WellPoint, which most certainly did yield income, several million dollars’ worth in compensation and stock options from 2000 to 2006. And, as the Smithsonian panel concedes, all of Burke’s absences were approved by her supervisor, Small.

But the Smithsonian’s panel contends that Burke’s corporate affiliations courted the appearance of a conflict of interest. “If one’s income from outside sources far exceeds the income from his or her main employment,” the report argues, “it is difficult to believe that the primary employer is getting the full attention it deserves.”

Is Networking a Conflict?
Part of the difficulty in weighing the allegations against Burke is that the Smithsonian is a unique creature, a federally endowed museum complex that also functions as a nonprofit corporation, with heavy private-sector participation and a $1.1 billion annual budget, about 30 percent of which comes from donations from the private sector and the Smithsonian's own business ventures.

In such a context, it's hard to discern clearly where the mandate to keep in circulation among high-powered donors ends and where the specter of a conflict of interest can be said to begin.

The adverse press from the small scandal has made such judgment calls largely moot, however. The Smithsonian board voted last week to bar future executives from serving on corporate boards -- although not on nonprofit ones.

That's potentially a big loss, Burke says. "You come into contact with people who are important, exposing them to the institution, engaging them," she said. "The institution benefited by my exposing to other people what we were involved in." And that, she contends, creates "a much higher level of understanding and appreciation for an organization that is enormously complex."

Burke's critics contend that the story is much simpler. Melanie Sloan, who directs the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, argues that Burke "parlayed her experience" as a top Capitol Hill aide into "millions of dollars." "She may not have done anything more serious" than the missteps alleged in the report, Sloan said. "But I think she has to go because of an appearance problem, and the Smithsonian can no longer afford to have any."

To judge by her swift resignation, Burke agrees with at least that much of Sloan's indictment. Still, when it comes to the substance of the charges against her, Burke is stolidly unapologetic.

And looking back on the endgame of a career that comes as close as any can to encapsulating the notion that well-rewarded public service can accomplish real public good, she again sounds equal parts puzzled and besieged. "Was I involved in outside activities? Yes. Did I disclose them? Absolutely. Did I neglect my job? No."