According to a 1964 survey of black servicemen and veterans, this group enjoyed military life more than whites and were more favorably disposed toward the equal opportunity efforts of the Department of Defense.[22-4] They continued to complain, but the volume of their complaints was considerably reduced. One unsettling note: although fewer in number, the complaints were often addressed to the White House, the Justice Department, the civil rights organizations, or the Secretary of Defense, thus confirming the Gesell Committee's finding that black servicemen continued to distrust the services' interest in or ability to administer justice.[22-5]
The Secretary of Defense's manpower staff processed all these complaints. It dismissed those considered unrelated to race but forwarded many to the individual services with requests for immediate remedial action. Significantly, those involving the violation of a serviceman's civil rights off base continued to be sent to the Justice Department for disposition. Defense Department officials themselves adjudicated the hundreds of discrimination cases involving civilian employees.[22-6]
In the weeks and months following publication of the equal opportunity directive, official replies to the demands and complaints of black servicemen and their allies in the civil rights organizations continued to be carefully circumscribed. Whatever skepticism such restricted application of the Gesell recommendations may have produced among the civil rights leaders, the department found itself surprisingly free from outside pressure. It was able to set the pace of its own reform and to avoid meanwhile a clash with either reformers or segregationists over major civil rights issues of the day.
Creating a Civil Rights Apparatus
The Defense Department could do little about discrimination either on or off the military reservation until it was better organized for the task. The secretary needed new bureaucratic tools with which to develop new civil rights procedures, unite the disparate service programs, and document whatever failures might occur. He created a civil rights secretariat, assigning to his manpower assistant, Norman S. Paul,[22-7] the responsibility for promoting equal opportunity in the armed forces. Although racial affairs had always been considered among the manpower secretary's general duties, with precedents reaching back through the Personnel Policy Board to World War II when Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy supervised the employment of black troops, McNamara now significantly increased these responsibilities. The assistant secretary would represent him "in civil rights matters," would direct the department's equal opportunity programs, and would provide policy guidance for the military departments, reviewing their policies, regulations, instructions, and manuals and monitoring their performance.[22-8] To carry out these functions, the Secretary of Defense authorized his assistant to create a deputy assistant secretary for civil rights.[22-9] Again a precedent existed for the secretary's move. In January 1963 Paul had assigned an assistant to coordinate the department's racial activities.[22-10] The reorganization transferred the person and duties of the secretary's civilian aide, James C. Evans, to the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. The new organization was thus provided with a pedigree traceable to World War I and the work of Emmett J. Scott,[22-11] although Evans' move to the deputy's staff was the only connection between Scott and that office. The civilian aides, limited by the traditionally indifferent attitudes of the services toward equal opportunity programs, had been used to advise civilian officials on complaints from the black community, especially black servicemen, and to rationalize service policies for civil rights organizations. The new civil rights office, reflecting McNamara's positive intentions, was organized to monitor and instruct military departments.
The civil rights deputy was a relatively powerless bureaucrat. He might investigate discrimination and isolate its causes, but he enjoyed no independent power to reform service practices. His substantive dealings with the services had to be staffed through his superior, the Assistant Secretary for Manpower, a man to whom equal opportunity was but one of many problems and who might well question new or aggressive civil rights tactics. Such an attitude was understandable in an official with little or no experience in civil rights matters and no day-to-day contact with civil rights operations. Norman Paul, whose experience was in legislative liaison, might also be especially sensitive to the possibility of congressional or public criticism.[22-12] Indicative of the assistant secretary's attitude toward his civil rights deputy was the fact that the position was reorganized and retitled, with some significant corresponding changes in function each time, a bewildering five times in ten years.[22-13] To add to the problems of the civil rights office, nine different men were to occupy the deputy's position, three of them in the capacity of acting deputy, in that same decade.[22-14]
The organization of the equal opportunity program of the Secretary of Defense was not without its critics. Some wanted to enhance the prestige of the equal opportunity program by creating a separate assistant secretary for civil rights.[22-15] Such an official, accountable to the Secretary of Defense alone, would be free to direct the services' racial activities and, they agreed, would also serve as a highly visible symbol to servicemen and civil rights advocates alike of the department's determination to execute its new policy. Others, however, defended the existing organization, arguing that racial discrimination was a manpower problem, and the number of assistant secretaries was fixed by law and the chance of congressional approval for yet another manpower position was remote.[22-16]
These organizational problems had yet to appear in July 1963 when at Yarmolinsky's suggestion Secretary McNamara appointed Alfred B. Fitt the first civil rights deputy. Since 1961 the Army's Deputy Under Secretary for Manpower, Fitt had recently been on loan to the Office of the Secretary of Defense to coordinate the department's responses to the Gesell Committee. He was the author of the equal opportunity directive signed by McNamara, and his personal views on the subject, while consistent with those of Yarmolinsky and McNamara, were often expressed in more advanced terms. Going beyond the usual arguments for equal treatment based on morale and military efficiency, Fitt referred to the black servicemen's struggle as a moral issue. He was glad, he later confessed, to be on the right side of such an issue, and he felt indebted to the positive racial policies of Kennedy and Johnson and their Secretary of Defense.[22-17] He quickly gathered around him a staff of like-minded experts who proceeded to their first task, a review of the services' outline plans called for in the secretary's directive.[22-18]
