Aspin Meets With Joint Chiefs to Forge Deal on Gay Ban : Military: All sides in dispute make intensive effort to find compromise acceptable to most. Administration targets Powell’s support.

With a decision near on whether and how to lift the military’s ban on gays in the services, Defense Secretary Les Aspin met for an hour Friday with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a continuing effort to forge a compromise that would fend off legislative challenges to a change in the policy.

Particularly important to the Administration is the support of Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in recent weeks has sounded conciliatory in his public comments. According to sources, he is not as resistant to change as at least two other service chiefs.

Like President Clinton, said the source, Powell is eager to put the issue behind him. “He just doesn’t like the disruption” that the debate has caused within the ranks, said a Pentagon official.

“The one thing we have going for us is that everyone really wants this issue behind them,” said one senior Administration official, “even Sam Nunn.”

Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a staunch supporter of the ban on gays in the service, is another of the key players whose support the White House is trying to win in the final negotiations. Almost equal attention has gone to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the best-known gay member of Congress and an advocate of compromise on the issue.

In addition to consulting with key figures in the debate, White House and Pentagon officials have besieged Capitol Hill and the Pentagon’s E-Ring, where the military’s top brass have offices, bearing draft policies and seeking comment. The intensive search for a proposal that meets at least minimal demands on all sides will soon enter its fourth week.

“What’s the ideal picture?” asked a senior White House official rhetorically. “A press conference with Les Aspin, Colin Powell, Sam Nunn, Barney Frank and Gerry Studds (a second openly gay member of Congress). But I don’t think that’s real likely.”

A more likely possibility, a White House aide said, is a compromise where “you may have to get two out of three”--Powell, Nunn and Frank. “That’s what the next few weeks are about.”

The broad outlines of a compromise have been clear for several weeks: The military would stop asking recruits about their sexual orientation and would stop actively seeking out gays within the services. In return, gay service members would have to be discreet about their status.

But within those parameters, minute details have assumed huge importance to advocates on both sides.

“The nuances are so subtle that very small changes can make very big consequences,” said a senior Administration official.

The two key issues now are whether gay service members would be able to discuss their sexual status privately in conversations with friends or colleagues without jeopardizing their jobs and whether the new policy would still state explicitly that homosexuality is “incompatible” with service.

Clinton would very much like to avoid that language but many senior military officers strongly want it. Indeed, it has been the defining passage in a policy recommendation drafted for Aspin by his panel of military advisers on the issue and Pentagon officials said last week that Aspin had tentatively accepted inclusion of the statement.

But that was before a leaked version of the document, including the “incompatibility” passage, became public and ignited a firestorm among gay activists and their supporters on Capitol Hill. Frank, who had established himself as a mediator between gay activists and the Administration, said flatly that any policy that included the passage would be unacceptable.

And in an angry letter to Clinton this week, a group of gay activists--including Clinton friend David Mixner--told the President: “We are truly amazed and dismayed to see the man we believed in bend to the voices of bigotry.”

Clinton, for his part, is anxious to find a compromise solution to the problem. At the same time, however, his aides believe that he has suffered about as much damage as is possible from his advocacy of gay service and now must worry about not seeming to go so far as to abandon his campaign pledge to try to lift the ban.

“Either you feel you have a compromise you can sell in good conscience as a step forward or you recognize that you don’t and stand on principle, aware of the consequences,” the senior official said.

That is a message that Clinton has begun to receive clearly from gay and lesbian activists as the final weeks of deliberations get under way. Faced with a compromise that they believe will not end the military’s “witch hunts” for homosexuals and will force gay men and lesbians to continue to lie about themselves, most gay activists would sooner lose in a showdown than “move to the middle of the bus,” said Mixner.

While many activists had hoped to help shape the Pentagon’s recommendation, most now said that they are dispirited by the effort. In the end, they have placed their faith in the man who was their first champion and is the decision’s final arbiter--President Clinton.