under
constant pressure from black officers and men who were not only
reporting inequities in the newly integrated services and complaining
of the remaining racial discrimination within the military community
but were also demanding the department's assistance in securing their
constitutional rights from the communities outside the military bases.
This was particularly true in the fields of public education, housing,
and places of entertainment.

The services as well as the Defense Department's manpower officials
resisted these demands and continued in the early 1960's to limit
their racial reforms to those necessary but exclusively internal
matters most obviously connected with the efficient operation of their
units. Reinforcing this resistance was the reluctance on the part of
most commanders to break with tradition and interfere in what they
considered community affairs. Nor had McNamara's early policy
statements in response to servicemen's demands come to grips with the
issue of discrimination in the civilian community. At the same time,
some reformers in the Defense Department had allied themselves with
like-minded progressives throughout the administration and were
searching for a way to carry out President Kennedy's commitment to
civil rights. These individuals were determined to use the services'
early integration successes as a stepping-stone to further civil
rights reforms while the administration's civil rights program
remained bogged down in Congress.

Although these reformers believed that the armed forces could be an
effective instrument of social change for society at large, they
clothed their aims in the garb of military efficiency. In fact,
military efficiency was certainly McNamara's paramount concern when he
supported the idea of enlarging the scope of his department's racial
programs and when in 1962 he readily accepted the proposal to appoint
the Gesell Committee to study the services' racial program.

The Gesell Committee easily documented the connection, long suspected
by the reformers, between discrimination in the community and poor
morale among black servicemen and the link between morale and combat
efficiency. More important, with its ability to publicize the extent
of discrimination against black servicemen in local communities and to
offer practical recommendations for reform, the committee was able (p. 621)
to stimulate the secretary into action. Yet not until his last years
in office,