The quiet crusader: Stephen Herbits has worked for every Republican president since Richard Nixon. Now the openly gay Defense Department insider--who opposes "don't ask, don't tell"--is fighting for gay rights in Florida's Miami-Dade County. (People).

Stephen Herbits wasn't surprised to hear his old friend Donald Rumsfeld on the other end of the phone line. The newly appointed secretary of Defense was calling in January 2001 to enlist Herbits in a familiar role: overseeing Pentagon hiring in the Bush administration. It was a task that Herbits, who has known Rumsfeld for more than 30 years, has performed for every Republican president since Richard Nixon.

Herbits, 60, quietly agreed to a 120-day consultancy with the Defense Department while looking forward to returning to the peaceful anonymity of his semiretirement in Miami Beach, Fla. But before he even had a chance to miss his sun-drenched condo and its view of the city skyline, Herbits found himself embroiled in a political fire-storm over gay appointees to the Bush administration.

Lou Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, called the appointment of the former Seagram executive a "slap in the face to our [military] servicemen and to Congress." Robert Maginnis, the Family Research Council's vice president for national security and foreign policy, declared it "inappropriate" for the Pentagon to hire Herbits, who opposes the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, to "vet key people who will run the Pentagon." Gay Republicans, meanwhile, heralded his hiring as proof that the Bush administration would not use sexual orientation as a bar to employment.

Nevertheless, Herbits says today, "I was treated with nothing but respect at the Pentagon. After all, I was known around the building as a professional for the work I did. You wouldn't believe the number of very powerful military and civilian officials who came up to me to tell me how wrong the religious right was to be undertaking this campaign against me."

In this time of war, Herbits's experience provides a rare insider's glimpse of the current Pentagon brass's attitude toward gay and lesbian civilian employees and the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

This is the first time Herbits has agreed to talk about being targeted by the right wing as a gay Defense Department official. A five-year Florida resident, Herbits has granted the interview because he believes it's important that he also speak out in support of the current campaign against a September ballot measure in Florida's Miami-Dade County. The measure would repeal the county's ban on antigay discrimination, passed in 1998.

Herbits did not hesitate to step out from behind his Defense Department desk to go to battle in Miami. He left a second consulting gig at the Bush administration's Pentagon--retooling personnel after last year's terrorism attacks--after the president's younger brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, sided with antigay activists over a criminal investigation into the ballot measure's validity.

"I was so offended that I went to Rumsfeld and said, `I have to go home because I have to protect my kids from the president's brother.'" When a surprised Rumsfeld asked, "Your kids?" Herbits says he quickly explained, "Not my birth kids, but my kids who are struggling with their sexual orientation and have no one to take care of them. This referendum is not just about their rights--it seeks to strip away rights they already have. That's why it's urgent I return home." According to Herbits, Rumsfeld responded by saying "something to the effect of `I understand. I wish it wasn't like this.'"

Herbits says Jeb Bush, who is facing reelection and has not taken an official position on the ballot measure, has ignored his several requests for a meeting. "The governor will not respond to my communications," he says. "I don't think he knows or cares who I am. I think he's getting some bad advice"--in particular, Herbits says, from former congressman Charles Canady--"and pandering to the right wing." (Bush's press office in Tallahassee did not return calls for comment.)

But while Herbits proudly serves as an adviser to the No to Discrimination campaign being mounted by SAVE Dade, the nonprofit group opposing the referendum, he remains far more comfortable outside the public limelight. "You can get a lot more done behind the scenes, and you don't have to waste time kissing babies," he jokes.

Indeed, his resume reads like that of the quintessential Washington insider. After graduating from Tufts University in Massachusetts in 1964, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work on Capitol Hill, where he became what is now known as a "policy wonk."

He got to know Rumsfeld, then a three-term congressman from suburban Chicago, while researching his book How to End the Draft, which Rumsfeld endorsed. In 1972, Herbits graduated from Georgetown University Law School.

Two years later Rumsfeld was named President Ford's chief of staff, and Herbits wound up in the office of presidential personnel, which was charged with hiring more than 700 cabinet officials. It was there that Herbits realized the powerful role hiring practices can play in shaping political direction. "Personnel is, ultimately, policy," he says. "If there was a candidate I didn't like for some good reason, I could bring it up in the vetting process. If there was someone I really liked, I could push the person along."

Herbits and Rumsfeld shared a preference for highly skilled and hawkish national security officials. Even then, Herbits says, he could see that Rumsfeld, who is 10 years his senior, was headed for big things. "The guy is just incredibly smart and focused," he says. "He has an extraordinary ability to look way down the road. But because he works so hard and is so rational, he expects others to work to his level. He doesn't spend a lot of time coddling people."

Given the mutual respect, it wasn't surprising that when Ford named Rumsfeld secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld soon tapped Herbits as his top civilian aide. But Ford's 1976 defeat sent Herbits to the private sector in New York City. "Though I was disappointed with Ford's loss, I was relieved to be away from the stress of politics," he says. "I had been in Washington during the deepest part of the cold war, and in the morning briefings we would spend our time monitoring where the Soviets were taunting us. If people think the cold war wasn't a war, they just were not there. I was simply exhausted."

Herbits went to work for Seagram, which later acquired Universal and has since merged with a French company to become Vivendi Universal. At Seagram, Herbits rose quickly to executive vice president, with close ties to chairman Edgar M. Bronfman. He also remained in high demand in Washington's conservative military establishment. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, deputy secretary of Defense designate Frank Carlucci asked him to head recruitment for Caspar Weinberger's Pentagon. Herbits took a short leave from Seagram to do so but returned to the company, and to New York City, that same year.

It was while living in New York that he came out as a gay man, getting involved first in the fight against AIDS and then helping fund the early days of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. "I certainly wasn't alone in Washington in the 1970s," he says, "but it was a quiet culture with a lot of rules about what you could say. New York was a much more open environment to explore gay life." At Seagram he also encouraged the marketing department to target gay and lesbian consumers for the first time. Dozens of corporations soon followed suit. (Under Herbits, Seagram sponsored "The Long Road to Freedom," a 1996 traveling exhibition of archives from The Advocate.)

In 1989, Herbits returned briefly to D.C. after receiving a call from Dick Cheney, then-secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush, whom he had come to know and admire in the Ford administration. One of the appointments Herbits recommended at that time was Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of Defense and one of Herbits's closest associates at the Pentagon.

In 1991, Herbits was back at Seagram and staying at his vacation home on New York's Fire Island when he received a call from Pete Williams, the chief Pentagon spokesman during the Persian Gulf War. Williams, who is now a reporter for NBC News, was the target of an outing campaign because of the ban on gay and lesbian military personnel. He sought the counsel of Herbits, who had also been a civilian employee at the Pentagon. [The August 27, 1991, issue of The Advocate featured Pete Williams and the story of his outing.)

"I knew Pete quite well because he was an insider with Cheney," Herbits says. "I remember walking around my deck [on Fire Island], talking to him about the problem. Out of loyalty he wanted to quit, to avoid embarrassing his boss. I encouraged him not to. I thought he could succeed if he stayed put."

Not long after his conversation with Williams, Herbits received a phone call from Cheney. "Dick called me about something else," he says, "and I told him, in the spirit of full disclosure, `I need to tell you I've been talking to Pete about the outing.' I hadn't spoken to Dick about it. It wasn't my business. But once Dick called me, I didn't want him to think I was being surreptitious. He said he was very eager to keep Pete."

Cheney's unequivocal support for his gay aide didn't surprise Herbits. "Guys like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even [George W.] Bush believe very simply and decently about things," he says. "Bush has been beaten up all over the world for saying `You are either with us or against us' in the war against terrorism. I think these guys are equally clear about the fact that it's wrong to discriminate on a personal level. I'm not saying they are gay rights supporters or oblivious to politics, but when push comes to shove, they will support you and do the right thing, as they did in my case."

Herbits's faith in Cheney was later vindicated when the secretary, under questioning by a House panel, termed the security rationale for the military ban on gay and lesbian personnel "a bit of an old chestnut." "I really believe that if changing the policy didn't require congressional action, this administration would be open to" revisiting the policy, Herbits insists. "I haven't really had this conversation with Cheney or Rumsfeld, but I don't get the sense that they have much invested in the policy at all."

In 1997, at the age of 55, Herbits retired from Seagram and moved to Miami Beach, where he set up a consulting business and volunteered with nonprofit groups. "It was a great life," he says. "I had my student years, my Washington years, and my business years. I felt blessed [in retirement] to have my charitable years. It's like I've been able to lead four different lives, each with distinct rewards."

When he wasn't assisting groups such as the Dade Human Rights Foundation, which funds gay causes, he spent time "reading and keeping up with national affairs," he says. "I went to the gym. I really enjoyed my social time across a table eating lunch or dinner and having conversations with friends."

But in 1999 Herbits's blissful existence took a turn for the worse. First his mother broke her hip and had to enter a nursing home. Then, after a difficult breakup with his boyfriend, two old friends of Herbits's were murdered within one week of each other.

"I was pretty down about it all," he says. "But I decided I wasn't going to let the year destroy me. The only thing I could think of doing was to go back to the gym with a vengeance, stop social drinking, and make sure I put only healthy foods in my body. I wanted to make sure my body was strong enough to withstand the emotional pressure I was under." He also treated himself to a Harley Road King, on which he can now be seen cruising the roads of south Florida accompanied by his 39-year-old nephew, who has a Harley of his own.

Herbits took a keen interest in the 2000 presidential election. Though he won't divulge how he voted, contribution records show that he donated $17,000 to Democratic candidates. "Let's just say, by that point I'd become a single-issue voter, and there were not a lot of alternatives," he says with a laugh.

He was furious about the way in which a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court decided the outcome of the Florida recount. "What concerned me wasn't that Bush was eventually going to be elected," he says. "The problem was the Supreme Court's political intrusion into the state's business. As a lawyer, it really disturbed me that the court had risked a constitutional crisis by stepping in."

Despite his misgivings about the election, when Rumsfeld called, he agreed to what he thought would be one final tour of Washington duty. A liberal on social issues, Herbits is far to the right of most gay leaders on military matters. "I really believe in a strong national defense to defend liberty and democracy," he says. "When it comes to an issue like Iraq, I feel that we have to have the military might and willingness to use it to stop the potential for the use of weapons of mass destruction."

But even this hawkishness hasn't spared him from set-tos with conservatives. Even as he was under public attack by antigay forces outside the Pentagon, Herbits was jousting with Senate minority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) behind the scenes. Senators customarily push political cronies on federal agencies, and it was Herbits's job to weed out unqualified recommendations.

"Lott had a candidate for a job," he explains. "I interviewed the candidate and found that he was not qualified. I told the candidate something to that effect. It was clear that the candidate was applying only to protect one of the shipyards in Lott's state. That's not the kind of appointment I can recommend; it's contrary to good government. Lott called the secretary and told him he was offended by my conduct. The secretary called me in and told me that while he supported me, he wondered whether I couldn't have found a more diplomatic way of expressing my concern."

Herbits says Lott retaliated by bringing the Pentagon confirmation process to a standstill. "To me it was just a staggering abuse of power," he says, still fuming more than a year later. "Lott was wrong and corrupt and was willing to jeopardize national security for personal political gain."

Herbits concedes, however, that his reaction to Lott's lobbying is influenced by the senator's well-known contempt for issues of concern to gay men and lesbians. "Certainly it's hard to have an objective view of someone who thinks I should not exist," Herbits says. "I couldn't change the low opinion I have of the man. I made the right decision, but I probably didn't handle it in the most elegant manner."

Herbits hopes the outpouring of support from unexpected sources in his battle with Lott and when he was targeted by antigay activists in 2001 augurs well for the vote in Miami-Dade County, a gay rights battleground since Anita Bryant's crusade a quarter century ago. This year's balloting will take place on September 10, but Herbits characteristically vows not to make political hay out of the one-year anniversary of September 11. While other gay activists have cited [the terrorist attacks] as a seminal moment in unifying Americans with differing views, Herbits insists, "We are assiduously avoiding being opportunistic on something very sensitive." The anniversary, he says, "is not relevant to the discrimination issue, which is the only issue. The only way we will win this referendum is if voters want to make a statement about not discriminating against anyone, about fairness, and about equal treatment."

Find The Advocate's past coverage of Stephen Herbit's career at www.advocate.com