he United States had become a leading protagonist in a cold war
in which the sympathies of the undeveloped and mostly colored world
would soon assume a special importance. Inasmuch as integration of
the services had become an almost universal demand of the black (p. 292)
community, integration became, willy-nilly, an important defense
issue.

A second stimulus to improvement of the black serviceman's position
was the Truman administration's strong civil rights program, which
gave executive sanction to a national movement started some years
before. The civil rights movement was the product of many factors,
including the federal government's increased sense of responsibility
for the welfare of all its citizens, a sense that had grown out of the
New Deal and a world war which expanded horizons and increased
economic power for much of the black population. The Supreme Court had
recently accelerated this movement by broadening its interpretation of
the Fourteenth Amendment. In the black community itself greater
participation in elections and new techniques in community action were
eroding discriminatory traditions and practices in many communities.

The civil rights movement had in fact progressed by 1948 to a stage at
which it was politically attractive for a Democratic president to
assume a vigorous civil rights stance. The urban black vote had become
a major goal of Truman's election campaign, and he was being pressed
repeatedly by his advisers to demonstrate his support for black
interests. A presidential order on armed forces integration logically
followed because the services, conspicuous practitioners of
segregation and patently susceptible to unilateral action on the part
of the Chief Executive, were obvious and necessary targets in the
black voters' campaign for civil rights.

Finally, the integration order resulted in part from the move toward
service unification and the emergence of James V. Forrestal as
Secretary of Defense. Despite misgivings over centralized control of
the nation's defense establishment and overconcentration of power in
the hands of a Secretary of Defense, Forrestal soon discovered that
certain problems rising out of common service experiences naturally
converged on the office of the secretary. Both by philosophy and
temperament he was disposed to avoid a clash with the services over
integration. He remained sensitive to their interests and rights, and
he frankly doubted the efficacy of s