On July 4, 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson surprised even some of his closest aides by signing the Freedom of Information Act. Johnson was said to have hated the “government-information bill”; he questioned the motives of the Democrat who was its chief architect, and was so disturbed by its passage that Bill Moyers, then L.B.J.’s press secretary, warned its supporters not to get their hopes up. With Congress in recess and the President vacationing in Texas, it was widely expected that Johnson would pocket-veto the bill.

Yet Johnson—possibly bowing to pressure from within the party, as well as from the American Society of Newspaper Editors—reversed course and signed the FOIA bill into law. His ambivalence was clear. There was strikingly little fanfare, especially considering the date. Johnson held no official signing ceremony, and the statement that he issued made no mention of the Fourth of July, leaving observers to ponder whether the timing was a symbolic flourish or simply a practical matter, determined by the pocket-veto deadline. His comments dwelled nearly as much on the limitations of the new law as its potential to transform the relationship between citizens and their government. The people, he said, should have as much information as possible—or, rather, all “that the security of the nation permits”:

No one should be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest. At the same time, the welfare of the nation or the rights of individuals may require that some documents not be made available. As long as threats to peace exist, for example, there must be military secrets. A citizen must be able in confidence to complain to his government and provide information, just as he is—and should be—free to confide in the press without fear of reprisal or of being required to reveal or discuss his source.

Johnson took pains to point out that the new law in no way impaired the President’s ability to maintain secrecy “when national interest so requires.”

Nearly fifty years after its passage, the Freedom of Information Act has become one of Johnson’s great legacies. FOIA requests have become a critical tool for journalists, activists, lawyers, and scholars seeking access to government documents, yet few are familiar with the act’s origins, and how its beginnings defined its place in American democracy.

In 1952, John Moss, a two-term California assemblyman, was elected to Congress, representing the state’s Third District, in Sacramento. Two years earlier, Senator Joseph McCarthy had made his fictive declaration that the State Department had two hundred and five Communists in its employ. McCarthyism represented the antithesis of Moss’s ideals. As Michael Lemov writes in “People’s Warrior,“ a biography of the congressman:

Moss knew all about the McCarthy approach. He had been a target of similar charges—of being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer—in his California campaigns, for both the state assembly and Congress. He survived the attacks but he did not forget them. In fact, they played a key role in his long campaign to secure freedom of information in government—a campaign that was, in part, grounded in his anger at being attacked with such potentially devastating charges, and by the attempt to use unsubstantiated smears against him.

If secrecy, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, is best understood as a form of regulation, then the McCarthy era conjured the worst aspects of big government: oligarchic, sprawling, and inimical to individual liberty. The pressures of the Cold War were already transforming government into tiered, hermetic bureaucracies, each distinguished by its own sometimes Byzantine relationship to the idea of “national security.” The emergence of a hypersecretive ethic in national politics coincided with the very public erosion of Fourth Amendment protections—in effect transferring the right to privacy from individuals to government itself.

But, as Moss saw it, national security was an amorphous doctrine, and a corrosive one: meant to suggest the need for strength and expediency, in practice, it abetted incompetence, corruption, and the abuse of authority. “The unfortunate fact,” he remarked, is “that governmental secrecy tends to grow as government itself grows.” And so, in 1954, still in his first term, Moss introduced a bill designed to limit that secrecy.

Introduced by a freshman congressman and lacking major backers, the bill was doomed. Moss pushed the bill annually, finding himself pitted against the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Administrations, none of which viewed his ideas favorably. It took twelve years for Moss to accrue the political standing to shepherd the bill to passage. (In an odd footnote, McCarthy himself supported the bill in the Senate, a move bespeaking a supreme lack of self-awareness. Another of the bill’s committed supporters was a second-term Republican representative named Donald Rumsfeld.)

The final version of the bill carved out exceptions for particular kinds of information, leading to an odd state of affairs wherein a document can be released in a jigsaw of redaction that makes deciphering government actions an art in itself. Yet, compared to the previous state of affairs, in which no official doctrine on government transparency prevailed and even the state’s most mundane functions were cloaked from public view, the FOIA marked a major improvement. At its least, as Moss intended, the act partly counterbalanced the dozens of laws establishing secrecy and penalties for the unauthorized release of information.

Escalating secrecy, the ambiguous prerogatives of national security, and an evisceration of the Fourth Amendment have marked the past two Presidential Administrations. FOIA’s unlikely path to passage points to a clear, if seldom voiced ideal: if national security is an abiding rationale for government secrecy, it offers at least as convincing an argument for governmental transparency.

To the extent that we’ve confronted these matters, it’s been through hypertensive debates over the motives of Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden. But the discussion has scarcely countenanced the idea of government’s own role in curtailing itself. This is something that the FOIA embodies. In an era of inertia, in which Congress seems unable or unwilling to carry out its most basic tasks, that kind of allegiance to an abstract ideal on the part of politicians and other officials may be too much to hope for. Yet it is certainly no more quixotic than a freshman congressman looking at a nation embroiled in a nuclear-arms race and declaring that excessive government secrecy was the true threat to democracy.

Photograph by Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty.