No single explanation seems to suffice for what was surely the century's bitterest journalistic failure. The Times, like most media of that era, fervently embraced the wartime policies of the American and British governments, both of which strongly resisted proposals to rescue Jews or to offer them haven. After a decade of economic depression, both governments had political reasons to discourage immigration and diplomatic reasons to refuse Jewish settlements in regions like Palestine.

Then, too, papers owned by Jewish families, like The Times, were plainly afraid to have a society that was still widely anti-Semitic misread their passionate opposition to Hitler as a merely parochial cause. Even some leading Jewish groups hedged their appeals for rescue lest they be accused of wanting to divert wartime energies.

At The Times, the reluctance to highlight the systematic slaughter of Jews was also undoubtedly influenced by the views of the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He believed strongly and publicly that Judaism was a religion, not a race or nationality -- that Jews should be separate only in the way they worshiped. He thought they needed no state or political and social institutions of their own. He went to great lengths to avoid having The Times branded a ''Jewish newspaper.'' He resented other publications for emphasizing the Jewishness of people in the news.

And it was his policy, on most questions, to steer The Times toward the centrist values of America's governmental and intellectual elites. Because his editorial page, like the American government and other leading media, refused to dwell on the Jews' singular victimization, it was cool to all measures that might have singled them out for rescue or even special attention.

Only once did The Times devote its lead editorial to the subject. That was on Dec. 2, 1942, after the State Department had unofficially confirmed to leading rabbis that two million Jews had already been slain and that five million more were indeed ''in danger of extermination.'' Even that editorial, however, retreated quickly from any show of special concern. Insisting in its title that Jews were merely ''The First to Suffer,'' it said the same fate awaited ''people of other faiths and of many races,'' including ''our own 'mongrel' nation'' and even Hitler's allies in Japan if he were to win the war.

In only one 48-hour period, in early March 1943, was the paper moved to concede in multiple ways that Europe's Jews merited extraordinary attention. The impetus apparently came from Anne O'Hare McCormick, the foreign affairs columnist, a favorite of Sulzberger and a member of his editorial board, who thought that a Madison Square Garden rally pleading for the rescue of Jews had exposed ''the shame of the world.''

''There is not the slightest question,'' she wrote, ''that the persecution of the Jews has reached its awful climax in a campaign to wipe them out of Europe. If the Christian community does not support to the utmost the belated proposal worked out to rescue the Jews remaining in Europe from the fate prepared for them, we have accepted the Hitlerian thesis and forever compromised the principles for which we are pouring out blood and wealth.''