tant and easier to
overcome. I did not fully understand the impact of housing
discrimination, and I did not know what to do about it."[23-73]

[Footnote 23-73: Ltr, Fitt to author, 22 May 72.]

A special Defense Department housing survey of thirteen representative
communities, including a study of service families in the Washington,
D.C., area, documented this failure. The survey described a housing
situation as of early 1967 in which progress toward open off-base
housing for servicemen was minimal. Despite the active off-base
programs sponsored by local commanders, discrimination in housing
remained widespread,[23-74] and based on four years' experience the
Department of Defense had to conclude that appeals to the community
for voluntary compliance would not produce integrated housing for
military families on a large scale. Still, defense officials were
reluctant to substitute more drastic measures. Deputy Secretary Vance,
for one, argued in early 1967 that nationwide application of
off-limits sanctions would raise significant legal issues, create
chaotic conditions in the residential status of all military
personnel, downgrade rather than enhance the responsibility of local
commanders to achieve their equal opportunity goals, and, above all,
fail to produce more integrated housing. Writing to the chairman of
the Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs
(ACCESS),[23-75] he asserted that open housing for servicemen (p. 602)
would be achieved only through the "full commitment at every level of
command to the proposition of equal treatment."[23-76]

[Footnote 23-74: Ltr, Dep SecDef to J. Charles Jones,
Chairman, ACCESS, 21 Feb 67, copy in CMH; see also
the detailed account of the Department of Defense's
housing campaign in Bahr, "The Expanding Role of
the Department of Defense," p. 105.]

[Footnote 23-75: ACCESS was one of the several local,
biracial open-housing groups that sprang up to
fight discrimination in housing during the
mid-1960's. The center of this particular group's
concern was in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.]

[Footnote 23-76: Ltr, Dep SecDef to Jones, 21 Feb 67,
copy in CMH.]

But even as Vance wrote, the department's housing pol