Note (Back) — CHAPTER 23

The department's national housing census confirmed the gloomy statistics projected from earlier studies indicating that housing discrimination was widespread and intractable and damaging to servicemen's morale.[23-86] McNamara decided that local commanders "were not going to involve themselves," and for the first time since sanctions were mentioned in his equal opportunity directive some four years before, he decided to use them in a discrimination case. The Secretary of Defense himself, not the local commander nor the service secretaries, made the decision: housing not opened to all servicemen would be closed to all servicemen.[23-87] Aware of the controversy accompanying such action, the secretary's legal counsel prepared a justification. Predictably, the department's lawyer argued that sanctions against discrimination in off-base housing were an extension of the commander's traditional right to forbid commerce with establishments whose policies adversely affected the health or morals of his men. Acutely conscious of the lack of federal legislation barring housing discrimination, Vance and his legal associates were careful to distinguish between an owner's legal right to choose his tenants and the commander's power to impose a military order on his men.