on of countless discrimination cases
involving individual black servicemen both on and off the military
base. Running through all their demands and expressed more and more
clearly during this period was the conviction that segregation itself
was discrimination. The success of their campaign against segregation
in the armed forces can be measured by the extent to which this
proposition came to be accepted in the counsels of the White House and
the Pentagon.

Because the demands of the civil rights advocates were extremely
persistent and widely heard, their direct influence on the integration
of the services has sometimes been overstressed. In fact, for much of
the period their most important demands were neutralized by the
logical-sounding arguments of those defending the racial _status quo_.
More to the point, the civil rights revolution itself swept along some
important defense officials. Thus the reforms begun by James Forrestal
and Robert McNamara testified to the indirect but important influence
of the civil rights movement.

Resisting the pressure for change was a solid bloc of officials (p. 610)
in the services which held out for the retention of traditional
policies of racial exclusion or segregation. Professed loyalty to
military tradition was all too often a cloak for prejudice, and
prejudice, of course, was prevalent in all the services just as it was
in American society. At the same time traditionalism simply reflected
the natural inclination of any large, inbred bureaucracy to preserve
the privileges and order of an earlier time. Basically, the military
traditionalists--that is, most senior officials and commanders of the
armed forces and their allies in Congress--took the position that
black servicemen were difficult to train and undependable in battle.
They cited the performance of large black combat units during the
world wars as support for their argument. They also rationalized their
opposition to integration by saying that the armed forces should not
be an instrument of social change and that the services could only
reflect the social mores of the society from which they sprang. Thus,
in their view, integration not only hindered the services' basic
mission by burdening them with undependable units and marginally
capable men, but also courted social upheaval in military units.

Eventually reconciled to the integration of military units, many
military officials continued to resist the idea that res