The Freedom of Information Act, authored by Sacramento’s own Congressman John E. Moss, (left) was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on July 4, 1966. It took more than a decade to get the legislation to LBJ’s desk, and it originated from Congress’s own frustation at being denied Executive Branch information. By the time it came to be signed, the nation was in a state of war far more literal and agonizing than any GWOT today, and the President had domestic ambitions—the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Act—at least as controversial and hard-fought as today’s Affordable Care Act. But the momentum that Congressman Moss had quietly built, with the awakening support of the press, left FOIA as, in the words of another great legislative leader of the day, “an idea whose time had come.” Jelani Cobb in this week’s New Yorker blog reminds us of that unlikely—and at the time little celebrated—gift of the strife-torn Sixties.
