on from the services a commitment to equal
treatment and opportunity and a practical program to achieve that end.
Yet even with this victory and the strong support of many senior
military officials, the possibility that determined foes of
integration might erect roadblocks or that simple bureaucratic inertia
would delay progress could not be discounted. There was, for example,
nothing in the postwar practices of the Marine Corps, even the
temporary integration of its few black recruits during basic training,
that hinted at any long-range intention of adopting the Navy's
integration program. And the fate of one of the committee's major
recommendations, that all the services adopt equal enlistment
standards, had yet to be decided. The acceptance of this
recommendation hinged on the results of a Defense Department study to
determine the jobs in each service that could be filled by men in the
lowest mental classification category acceptable to all three
services. Although the Navy and the Air Force had agreed to reexamine
the matter, they had consistently opposed the application of
enlistment parity in the past, and the Secretary of Defense's
Personnel Policy Board had indorsed their position. Secretary
Forrestal, himself, had rejected the concept, and there was nothing in
the record to suggest that his successor would do otherwise. Yet the
parity of enlistment standards was a vital part of the committee's
argument for the abolition of the Army's racial quota. If enlistment
standards were not equalized, especially in a period when the Army was
turning to Selective Service for much of its manpower, the number of
men in the Army's categories IV and V was bound to increase, and that
increase would provide strong justification for reviving the racial
quota. The Army staff was aware, if the public was not, that a
resurrected quota was possible, for the President had given the
Secretary of the Army authority to take such action if there was "a
disproportionate balance of racial strengths."[14-142]

[Footnote 14-142: Ltr, SA to President, 1 Mar 50, Fahy
Papers, Truman Library.]

The Army's concern with disproportionate balance was always linked to
a concern with the influx of men, mostly black, who scored poorly on
the classification tests. The problem, the Army repeatedly claimed,
was not the quantity of black troops but their quality. Yet at the
time the Army agreed to the committee's dema