These activities had little effect on the military housing situation. An occasional apartment complex or trailer court got integrated, but no substantial progress could be reported in the four years following Secretary McNamara's 1963 equal opportunity directive. On the contrary, the record suggests that many commanders, discouraged perhaps by the overwhelming difficulties encountered in the fair housing field, might agree with Fitt: "I have no doubt that I did nothing about it [housing discrimination] in 1963-4 because I was working on forms of discrimination at once more blatant and easier to overcome. I did not fully understand the impact of housing discrimination, and I did not know what to do about it."[23-73]
A special Defense Department housing survey of thirteen representative communities, including a study of service families in the Washington, D.C., area, documented this failure. The survey described a housing situation as of early 1967 in which progress toward open off-base housing for servicemen was minimal. Despite the active off-base programs sponsored by local commanders, discrimination in housing remained widespread,[23-74] and based on four years' experience the Department of Defense had to conclude that appeals to the community for voluntary compliance would not produce integrated housing for military families on a large scale. Still, defense officials were reluctant to substitute more drastic measures. Deputy Secretary Vance, for one, argued in early 1967 that nationwide application of off-limits sanctions would raise significant legal issues, create chaotic conditions in the residential status of all military personnel, downgrade rather than enhance the responsibility of local commanders to achieve their equal opportunity goals, and, above all, fail to produce more integrated housing. Writing to the chairman of the Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs (ACCESS),[23-75] he asserted that open housing for servicemen would be achieved only through the "full commitment at every level of command to the proposition of equal treatment."[23-76]
But even as Vance wrote, the department's housing policy was undergoing substantial revision. And, ironically, it was the very group to which Vance was writing that precipitated the change. It was the members of ACCESS who climaxed their campaign against segregated apartment complexes in the Washington suburbs with a sit-down demonstration in McNamara's reception room in the Pentagon on 1 February, bringing the problem to the personal attention of a Secretary of Defense burdened with Vietnam.[23-77] Although strongly committed to the principle of equal opportunity and always ready to support the initiatives of his civil rights assistants,[23-78] McNamara had largely ignored the housing problem. Later he castigated himself for allowing the problem to drift for four years.
I get charged with the TFX. It's nothing compared to the Bay of Pigs or my failure for four years to integrate off-base military housing. I don't want you to misunderstand me when I say this, but the TFX was only money. We're talking about blood, the moral foundation of our future, the life of the nation when we talk about these things.[23-79]
McNamara was being unnecessarily harsh with himself. There were several reasons, quite unrelated to either the Secretary of Defense or his assistants, that explain the failure of voluntarism to integrate housing used by servicemen. A major cause—witness the failure of President Johnson's proposed civil rights bill in 1966—was that open housing lacked a national consensus or widespread public support. Voluntary compliance was successful in other areas, such as public accommodation, transportation, and to some extent even in dependent schooling, precisely because the requests of local commanders were supported by a growing national consensus and the force of national legislation. In dealing with housing discrimination, however, these same commanders faced public indifference or open hostility without the comforting support of federal law. Even with the commander's wholehearted commitment to open housing, a commitment that equal opportunity directives from the services could by no means insure, his effectiveness against such widespread discrimination was questionable. Nothing in his training prepared him for the delicate negotiations involved in obtaining integrated housing. Moreover, it was extremely difficult if not impossible to isolate the black serviceman's housing plight from that of other black citizens; thus, an open housing campaign really demanded comprehensive action by the whole federal government. The White House had never launched a national open housing campaign; it was not, indeed, until 16 February 1967 that President Johnson submitted a compulsory national open housing bill to Congress.[23-80]
Whatever the factors contributing to the lack of progress, McNamara admitted that "the voluntary program had failed and failed miserably."[23-81] Philosophically, Robert McNamara found this situation intolerable. He had become interested in the "unused potential" of his department to change American society as it affected the welfare of servicemen. As Fitt explained, the secretary believed
any department which administers 10% of the gross national product, with influence over the lives of 10 million people, is bound to have an impact. The question is whether it's going to be a dumb, blind impact, or a marshaled and ordered impact. McNamara wanted to marshal that impact by committing defense resources to social goals that were still compatible with the primary mission of security.[23-82]
Clearly, the Secretary of Defense considered open housing for service families one of these goals, and when his attention was drawn to the immediacy of the problem by the ACCESS demonstration he acted quickly. At his instigation Vance ordered the local commanders of all services to conduct a nationwide census of all apartment houses, housing developments, and mobile home courts consisting of five or more rental units within normal commuting distance of all installations having at least 500 servicemen. He also ordered the commanders to talk to the owners or operators of these properties personally and to urge them to open their properties to all servicemen. He organized an Off-base Equal Opportunity Board, consisting of the open housing coordinators of each service and his office to monitor the census. Finally, he announced the establishment of a special action program under the direction of Thomas D. Morris, now the Assistant Secretary for Manpower. Aimed at the Washington, D.C., area specifically, the program was designed to serve as a model for the rest of the country.[23-83]
Vance also notified the service secretaries that subsequent to the census all local commanders would be asked to discuss the census findings with local community leaders in an effort to mobilize support for open housing. Later Assistant Secretary Morris, with the help of the acting civil rights deputy, L. Howard Bennett, spelled out a program for "aggressive" negotiation with community leaders and cooperation with other government agencies, in effect a last-ditch attempt to achieve open housing for servicemen through voluntary compliance. Underscoring the urgency of the housing campaign, the department demanded a monthly report from all commanders on their open housing activities,[23-84] and Morris promptly launched a proselytizing effort of his own in the metropolitan Washington area. Described simply by McNamara as "a decent man," Morris spoke indefatigably before civil leaders and realtors on behalf of open housing.[23-85]
The department's national housing census confirmed the gloomy statistics projected from earlier studies indicating that housing discrimination was widespread and intractable and damaging to servicemen's morale.[23-86] McNamara decided that local commanders "were not going to involve themselves," and for the first time since sanctions were mentioned in his equal opportunity directive some four years before, he decided to use them in a discrimination case. The Secretary of Defense himself, not the local commander nor the service secretaries, made the decision: housing not opened to all servicemen would be closed to all servicemen.[23-87] Aware of the controversy accompanying such action, the secretary's legal counsel prepared a justification. Predictably, the department's lawyer argued that sanctions against discrimination in off-base housing were an extension of the commander's traditional right to forbid commerce with establishments whose policies adversely affected the health or morals of his men. Acutely conscious of the lack of federal legislation barring housing discrimination, Vance and his legal associates were careful to distinguish between an owner's legal right to choose his tenants and the commander's power to impose a military order on his men.