"Maybe the whole notion of race is becoming more fluid," said Claudette Bennett, chief of the bureau's racial statistics branch.

Officials at the White House and the Justice Department said no political pressure had been exerted over the statistics branch.

In April, as the report was being completed, Mr. Greenfeld's office drafted a news release to announce the findings and submitted it for review to the office of Tracy A. Henke, who was then the acting assistant attorney general who oversaw the statistics branch.

Dr. Meade Morgan, chief of the centers' statistics branch, said he expected the epidemic would peak at different times in different groups.

Brooks was chief of the statistics branch of the War Department General Staff from 1939 to 1941, where he was closely associated with General George C. Marshall and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.

"You had all regions going full throttle," said Steven Berman, a statistician for the bureau's residential statistics branch.

Defence Analytical Services and Advice (DASA) is a statistical and economic unit within the MoD, initially created in 1992 from various statistics branches within the Ministry of Defence, as the Defence Analytical Services Agency.

In this latest case, the compromise may have assuaged officials of traditional civil rights groups and parents of multiracial children, but at least one expert, Roderick J. Harrison, former head of the Census Bureau's racial statistics branch, believes the solution may have made racial and ethnic statistics far less reliable.

"We really didn't expect that number," Claudette Bennett, the chief of the racial statistics branch at the Census Bureau, said in an interview today.

But Claudette Bennett, chief of the Census Bureau's racial statistics branch, was blunter: "With 50-50 hindsight, after we went with the 'mark-one-or-more' construction to the race question, we probably should have taken the 'some other race' box off of the questionnaire."