James Burke, former chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, is pictured receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation highest civilian honor, in 2000.

James Burke, the chairman and chief executive who guided Johnson & Johnson through a pair of crises in the 1980s sparked by poison-laced Tylenol capsules, has died, the drug company said yesterday.

Burke was 87 when he died Friday, Johnson & Johnson said in a statement.

The Princeton resident and Rutland, Vt.-native spent 37 years at Johnson & Johnson, the last 13 as chairman and CEO, before retiring in 1989. Under his watch, the company expanded at a remarkable clip, tripling its annual revenue to $9 billion, growing profits fivefold, and extending the company's brand to 54 countries.

"Jim Burke was among the greatest leaders in the history of American business," Alex Gorsky, the current CEO, said in the statement. "He will forever inspire the people of Johnson & Johnson."

It was Burke's steady leadership during a time when the company was tested by a spate of poisonings involving its iconic Tylenol brand that made him a lauded and textbook example of corporate ethics.

Over several days in the fall of 1982, seven people died after taking doses of extra-strength Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide. The incident produced a nationwide panic and an immediate response from Johnson & Johnson. The company almost immediately recalled Tylenol products from across the nation and worked round the clock to keep the public and government informed about the tainted pills.

A month after the attacks, Burke led a news conference during which he promised to rebuild the public's trust in the Johnson & Johnson brand and pledged that the company would absorb the $100 million cost to recall the product all on its own.

"He spoke the truth and that was astonishingly liberating for everyone who heard it because we have all become so accustomed to public figures telling less than the truth or lying," Richard Tedlow, a Harvard business professor, wrote in "Denial," his 2010 book about corporate leadership.

"What the public saw was someone who was not at all contrived, but a basic, decent person," said Michael Santoro, a professor at Rutgers Business School who teaches an ethics course includes an examination of the handling of the Tylenol crisis.

"Ethics wasn't a pie-in-the-sky notion to Jim Burke," Santoro said. He noted that Burke appeared genuinely distraught by the Tylenol killings, which have never been solved, and would speak of the victims by name and extend his sympathies to their families.

After authorities determined that the pills were poisoned after they had been distributed to retail stores, Johnson & Johnson introduced new tamper-resistant packaging to make it harder to break into packages undetected. But, in 1986, when a woman in New York state was killed from a cyanide-laced Tylenol capsule, Burke announced that the company could no longer assure the safety of its capsule product, which led to way to the creation of tamper-proof gel caps and caplets.

While striving to protect consumer safety, Johnson & Johnson under Burke also made sure to keep Tylenol the leader of the painkiller markets. Soon after the 1982 poisonings put a chill on the Tylenol business, the company ramped up a large-scale marketing campaign of television advertisement and mailed out coupons to revive the public trust in the brand.

A year later, the company had almost completely regained its market-share in pain medicines, according to news reports at the time.

Burke was born in 1925 and grew up in the upstate New York town called Slingerlands.

Before joining Johnson & Johnson as a product director in 1953, he served in the U.S. Navy as an ensign. During World War II, he commanded a landing craft tank in the Pacific. After the war, he earned degrees from Holy Cross and Harvard Business School.

After retiring from Johnson & Johnson, Burke became chairman of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. The work helped earn him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Bloomberg News contributed to this report.