might arise at the hundreds of bases and local
communities involved.[21-5]

[Footnote 21-5: USAF Oral Hist Interv with Zuckert,
Apr 73; Interv, O'Brien with Gilpatric, 5 May 70.]

Many of the manpower officials carefully differentiated between equal
treatment, which had always been at the heart of the Defense
Department's reforms, and civil rights, which they were convinced were
a constitutional matter and belonged in the hands of the courts and
the Justice Department. The principle of equal treatment and
opportunity was beyond criticism. Its application, a lengthy and
arduous task that had occupied and still concerned the services'
racial advisers, had brought the Department of Defense to unparalleled
heights of racial harmony. Convinced that the current civil rights
campaign was not the business of the Defense Department, they
questioned the motives of those who were willing to make black GI's
the stalking horse for their latest and perhaps transient enthusiasm,
in the process inviting congressional criticism of the department's
vital racial programs. In short, Assistant Secretary Runge and his
colleagues argued that the administration's civil rights campaign
should be led by the Justice Department and by the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare, not the Defense Department, which had
other missions to perform.

Such were the rationalizations that had kept the Department of Defense
out of the field of community race relations for over a decade, and
the opponents of change in a strong position. Their opposition was
reasonable, their allies in the services were legion, they were backed
by years of tradition, and, most important, they held the jobs where
the day-to-day decisions on racial matters were made. To change the
_status quo_, to move the department beyond the notion that the
guarantee of equal rights stopped at the boundaries of military
installations, might seem "desirable and indeed necessary" to
Yarmolinsky and his confreres,[21-6] but it would take something more
than their eloquent words to bring about change.

[Footnote 21-6: Ltr, Yarmolinsky to author, 30 May 72,
CMH files.]

Yarmolinsky was convinced that the initiative for such a change had to
come from outside the department. Certain that any outside
investigation would quickly reveal the connection between racial
discrimination in the community and military effic