ervicemen and their allies in the civil rights organizations
continued to be carefully circumscribed. Whatever skepticism such
restricted application of the Gesell recommendations may have produced
among the civil rights leaders, the department found itself
surprisingly free from outside pressure. It was able to set the pace
of its own reform and to avoid meanwhile a clash with either (p. 558)
reformers or segregationists over major civil rights issues of the
day.

_Creating a Civil Rights Apparatus_

The Defense Department could do little about discrimination either on
or off the military reservation until it was better organized for the
task. The secretary needed new bureaucratic tools with which to
develop new civil rights procedures, unite the disparate service
programs, and document whatever failures might occur. He created a
civil rights secretariat, assigning to his manpower assistant, Norman
S. Paul,[22-7] the responsibility for promoting equal opportunity in
the armed forces. Although racial affairs had always been considered
among the manpower secretary's general duties, with precedents
reaching back through the Personnel Policy Board to World War II when
Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy supervised the employment of
black troops, McNamara now significantly increased these
responsibilities. The assistant secretary would represent him "in
civil rights matters," would direct the department's equal opportunity
programs, and would provide policy guidance for the military
departments, reviewing their policies, regulations, instructions, and
manuals and monitoring their performance.[22-8] To carry out these
functions, the Secretary of Defense authorized his assistant to create
a deputy assistant secretary for civil rights.[22-9] Again a precedent
existed for the secretary's move. In January 1963 Paul had assigned an
assistant to coordinate the department's racial activities.[22-10] The
reorganization transferred the person and duties of the secretary's
civilian aide, James C. Evans, to the Office of the Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Civil Rights. The new organization was thus provided
with a pedigree traceable to World War I and the work of Emmett J.
Scott,[22-11] although Evans' move to the deputy's staff was the only
connection between Scott and that office. The civilian aides, limited
by the traditionally indifferent attitudes of the services toward
equal opportunity programs, had been used to