y in wait outside the
gates.

CHAPTER 23 (p. 581)

From Voluntary Compliance to Sanctions

The Defense Department's attitude toward off-base discrimination
against servicemen underwent a significant change in the mid-1960's.
At first Secretary McNamara relied on his commanders to win from the
local communities a voluntary accommodation to his equal opportunity
policy. Only after a lengthy interval, during which the accumulated
evidence demonstrated that voluntary compliance would, in some cases,
not be forthcoming, did he take up the cudgel of sanctions. His use of
this powerful economic weapon proved to be circumscribed and of brief
duration, but its application against a few carefully selected targets
had a salubrious and widespread effect. At the same time developments
in the civil rights movement, especially the passage of strong new
legislation in 1964, permitted servicemen to depend with considerable
assurance upon judicial processes for the redress of their grievances.

Sanctions were distasteful, and almost everyone concerned was anxious
to avoid their use. The Gesell Committee wanted them reserved for
those recalcitrants who had withstood the informal but determined
efforts of local commanders to obtain voluntary compliance. McNamara
agreed. "There were plenty of things that the commanders could do in a
voluntary way," he said later, and he wanted to give them time "to get
to work on this problem."[23-1] His principal civil rights assistants
considered it inappropriate to declare businesses or local communities
off limits while the services were still in the process of developing
voluntary action programs and before the full impact of new federal
civil rights legislation on those programs could be tested. As for the
services themselves, each was on record as being opposed to any use of
sanctions in equal opportunity cases. The 1963 equal opportunity
directive of the Secretary of Defense reflected this general
reluctance. It authorized the use of sanctions, but in such a
carefully restricted manner that for three years agencies of the
Department of Defense never seriously contemplated using them.

[Footnote 23-1: Interv, author with McNamara, 11 May
72.]

_Development of Voluntary Action Programs_

Despite this obvious aversion to the use of sanctions in equal
opportunity cases, the public impression p