years that mixing the races was a vast problem."
Bradley continued, "so any change in the Army would be a big step in
the South." General Haislip reasoned, you "just can't do it all of a
sudden." As for the influence of those opposed to maintaining the
Army's social _status quo_, Haislip, who was the Vice Chief of Staff
during part of the Gillem Board period, recalled that "everybody was
floundering around, trying to find the right thing to do. I didn't
lose any sleep over it [charges of discrimination]." General
Eisenhower, as he did so often during his career, accurately distilled
the thinking of his associates:

I believe that the human race may finally grow up to the point
where it [race relations] will not be a problem. It [the race
problem] will disappear through education, through mutual
respect, and so on. But I do believe that if we attempt merely by
passing a lot of laws to force someone to like someone else, we
are just going to get into trouble. On the other hand, I do not
by any means hold out for this extreme segregation as I said when
I first joined the Army 38 years ago.

These arguments might be specious, as a White House committee would
later demonstrate, but they were not necessarily guileful, for they
were the heartfelt opinions of many of the Army's leaders, opinions
shared by officials of the other services. These men were probably
blind to the racism implicit in their policies, a racism nurtured by
military tradition. Education and environment had fostered in these
career officers a reverence for tradition. Why should the Army, these
traditionalists might ask, abandon its black units, some with
histories stretching back almost a century? Why should the ordered
social life of the Army post, for so long a mirror of the segregated
society of most civilian communities, be so uncomfortably changed? The
fact that integration had never really been tried before made it
fraught with peril, and all the forces of military tradition conspired
to support the old ways.

What had gone unnoticed by Army planners was the subtle change in the
attitude of the white enlisted man toward integration. Opinion surveys
were rare in an institution dedicated to the concept of military
discipline, but nevertheless in the five years following the war
several surveys were made of the racial views of white troops (the
views of black soldiers were ignored, probably on the assumption tha