an could be injured or dead." Operating under the principle that the
safety and welfare of the individual transcended the civil rights of
the group, these officials wanted to forbid the men, both the black
and the increasing number of white activists, to disobey local
segregation laws and customs.

The opponents of intervention pointed out that the services would be
ill-advised to push for changes outside the military reservation until
the reforms begun under Truman were completely realized inside the
reservation. Ignoring the argument that discrimination in the local
community had a profound effect on morale, they wanted the services to
concentrate instead on the necessary but minor reforms within their
jurisdiction. To give the local commander the added responsibility for
correcting discrimination in the community, they contended, might very
well dilute his efforts to correct conditions within the services. And
to use servicemen to spearhead civil rights reform was a misuse of
executive power. With support from the department's lawyers, they
questioned the legality of using off-limits sanctions in civil rights
cases. They constantly repeated the same refrain: social reform was
not a military function. As one manpower spokesman put it to the
renowned black civil rights lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, "let the Army
tend its own backyard, and let other government agencies work on civil
rights."[21-4]

[Footnote 21-4: Interv, author with Evans, 4 Mar 72.]

Runge and the rest were professional manpower managers who had a (p. 534)
healthy respect for the chance of command error and its effect on race
relations nationally. In this they found an ally in Secretary of the
Air Force Eugene M. Zuckert, one of the architects of Air Force
integration in 1949. American commanders lacked training in the
delicate art of community relations, Zuckert later explained, and
should even a few of them blunder they could bring on a race crisis of
major proportions. He sympathized with the activists' goals and was
convinced that the President as Commander in Chief could and should
use the armed forces for social ends; but these social objectives had
to be balanced against the need to preserve the military forces for
their primary mission. Again on the practical level, Deputy Secretary
of Defense Gilpatric was concerned with the problems of devising
general instructions that could be applied in all the diverse
situations that