And to assuage the fears of many on the committee that the Fed was compromising its treasured independence from political influence, the chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, spent a great deal of time discussing with his colleagues an agreement he was working on with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to codify the relationship between the Fed and Treasury in their crisis response efforts.

At one point in the March meeting, Mr. Bernanke seemed to be hoping his colleagues would wind down their questioning about that accord and move on to the real business of the meeting, weighing a vast expansion of the Fed’s quantitative easing efforts to pump money into the moribund economy. “I’m happy to answer as many questions as people want to ask,” Mr. Bernanke said, “but, again, I also hope to hear something about asset purchases before we close today.”

In isolation, these are all perfectly worthwhile subjects for Fed officials to be weighing and debating. But there is far less in the transcripts that suggest the kind of hair-on-fire urgency to do more to try to help the domestic economy in its darkest hour.

What would that sense of urgency look like? As it happens, one member of the committee, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, offered at the March meeting the kind of statement that, knowing what we know now, looks remarkably prescient.

“The economy is just a disaster area,” said Janet L. Yellen, now the chairwoman of the institution. “The economic outlook is utterly dreadful, and we have said we stand ready to do absolutely everything that’s needed to support the economy. We have let some time pass without doing anything, and in light of the outlook I would want to do everything we can.”