omic weapon against those who discriminated?

Those defense officials calling for further changes also argued that
even the limited reforms already introduced by the administration
faced slow going in the Department of Defense. This point was of
particular concern to Robert Kennedy and his assistants in the Justice
Department who agreed that senior defense officials lacked neither the
zeal nor the determination to advance the civil rights of black
servicemen but that the uniformed services were not, as Deputy
Secretary Gilpatric expressed it, "putting their hearts and souls into
really carrying out all of these directives and policies." Reflecting
on it later, Gilpatric decided that the problem in the armed forces
was one of pace. The services, he believed, were willing enough to
carry out the policies, but in their own way and at their own speed,
to avoid the appearance of acting as the agent of another federal
department.

All these arguments failed to convince Assistant Secretary for
Manpower Runge, some officials in the general counsel's office, and
principal black adviser on racial affairs James Evans, among others.
This group and their allies in the services could point to a political
fact of life: to interfere with local segregation laws and customs,
specifically to impose off-limits sanctions against southern businessmen,
would pit the administration against powerful congressmen, calling (p. 533)
down on it the wrath of the armed services and appropriation committees.
To the charge that this threat of congressional retaliation was simply
an excuse for inaction, the services could explain that unlike the
recent integration of military units, which was largely an executive
function with which Congress, or at least some individual congressmen,
reluctantly went along, sanctions against local communities would be
considered a direct threat by scores of legislators. "Even one obscure
congressman thus threatened could light a fire over military
sanctions," Evans later remarked, "and there were plenty of folks
around who were eager to fan the flames."

[Illustration: JAMES EVANS.]

Even more important, the department's equal opportunity bureaucracy
argued, was the need to protect the physical well-being of the
individual black soldier. In a decade when civil rights beatings and
murders were a common occurrence, these men knew that Evans was right
when he said "by the time Washington could enter the case the young
m