climax of the struggle for racial equality in
the armed forces. But in some ways the order was simply a practical
response to a presidential dilemma.

The President's order was related to the advent of the cold war.
Developments in the Middle East and Europe testified to the ambitions
of the Soviet Union, and many Americans feared the spread of communism
throughout the world, a threat more ominous with the erosion of
American military strength since World War II. In March 1947 Truman
enunciated a new foreign policy calling for the containment of Soviet
expansion and pledging economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey.
A year later he asked Congress to adopt the Marshall Plan for economic
aid to Europe, authorize military training, and enact a new selective
service law to maintain the armed forces at expanded levels. That same
month his principal military advisers met at Key West, Florida, to
discuss new military roles and missions for the armed forces, grapple
with paralyzing divisions among the services, and re-form the military
establishment into a genuinely unified whole.[12-1] As if to underscore
the urgency of these measures, the Soviet Union began in April 1948 to
harass Allied troops in Berlin, an action that would develop into a
full-scale blockade by June.

[Footnote 12-1: On the development of cold war roles
and missions for the services, see Timothy W.
Stanley, _American Defense and National Security_
(Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1956), Chapter
VIII.]

Integration of the armed forces hardly loomed large on the
international scene, but if the problem of race appeared insignificant
to military planners, the sheer number of Negroes in the armed forces
gave them new prominence in national defense. Because of postwar
racial quotas, particularly in the Army and Air Force, black
servicemen now constituted a significant segment of the service
population, and consequently their abilities and well-being had a
direct bearing on the nation's cold war defenses. The black community
represented 10 percent of the country's manpower, and this also
influenced defense planning. Black threats to boycott the segregated
armed forces could not be ignored, and civil rights demands had to be
considered in developing laws relating to selective service and
universal training. Nor could the administration overlook the fact
that t