1. The military departments shall, with the approval of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Manpower), issue appropriate instructions, manuals and regulations in connection with the leadership responsibility for equal opportunity, on and off base, and containing guidance for its discharge.
2. The military departments shall institute in each service a system for regularly reporting, monitoring and measuring progress in achieving equal opportunity on and off base.
C. Military Commanders:
Every military commander has the responsibility to oppose discriminatory practices affecting his men and their dependents and to foster equal opportunity for them, not only in areas under his immediate control, but also in nearby communities where they may live or gather in off-duty hours. In discharging that responsibility a commander shall not, except with the prior approval of the Secretary of his military department, use the off-limits sanction in discrimination cases arising within the United States.[21-66]
After some thirty months in office, Robert McNamara had made a most decisive move in race relations. In the name of fulfilling Harry Truman's pledge of equal treatment and opportunity he announced an aggressive new policy. Not only would the department work to eliminate discrimination in the armed forces, but when servicemen were affected it would work in the community as well. Even more ominous to the secretary's critics was the fact that the new policy revealed McNamara's willingness, under certain circumstances, to use the department's economic powers to force these changes. This directive marked the beginning of McNamara's most active period of participation in the civil rights revolution of the 1960's.
But the secretary's move did not escape strong criticism. The directive was denounced as infamous and shocking, as biased, impractical, undemocratic, brutally authoritarian, and un-American. If followed, critics warned, it would set the military establishment at war with society, inject the military into civilian political controversies in defiance of all traditions to the contrary, and burden military commanders with sociological tasks beyond their powers and to the detriment of their military mission.[21-67]
"It is hard to realize that your office would become so rotten and degraded," one critic wrote McNamara. "In my opinion you are using the tactics of a dictator.... It is a tragic event when the Federal Government is again trying to bring Reconstruction Days into the South. Again the military is being used to bring this about." Did businesses not have the right to choose their customers? Did local authorities not have the right to enforce the law in their communities? And surely the white soldier deserved the freedom to choose his associates.[21-68] Another correspondent reproached McNamara: "you have, without conscience and with total disregard for the honorable history of the Military of our Great Nation, signed our freedom away." And still another saw her white supremacy menaced: "We have a bunch of mad dogs in Washington and if you and others like you are not stopped, our children will curse us. We don't want black grandchildren and we won't have them. If you want to dance with them—you have two legs, start dancing."
Not all the correspondents were racist or hysterical. Some thoughtful citizens were concerned with what they considered extramilitary and illegal activities on the part of the services and took little comfort from the often repeated official statement that the Secretary of Defense had no present plans for the use of sanctions and hoped that they would never have to be used.[21-69]
Some defenders of the directive saw the whole controversy over sanctions as a red herring dragged across the path of a genuine equal treatment and opportunity program.[21-70] During congressional debate on the directive, the use of off-limits sanctions quickly became the respectable issue behind which those opposed to any reform could rally. The Senate debated the subject on 31 July; the House on 7 August. During lengthy sessions on those days, opponents cast the controversy in the familiar context of states' rights, arguing that constitutional and legal points were involved. As Congressman Durward G. Hall of Missouri put it: "The recommendations made in the report and in the directive indicate a narrowness of vision which, in seeing only the civil rights issue, has blinded itself to the question of whether it is proper to use the Armed Forces to enforce a moral or social, rather than a legal, issue in the civilian sector."[21-71]
Opponents argued generally that the directive represented government by fiat, an unprecedented extension of executive power that imposed the armed forces on civilian society in a new and illegal way. If the administration was already empowered to protect the civil rights of some citizens, why, they asked, was it pushing so hard for a civil rights bill? The fact was, several legislators argued, the Department of Defense was interfering with the civil rights of businessmen and practicing a crude form of economic blackmail.[21-72]