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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.
