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

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.)