During the years 1939-1945, the Times carefully weighed allegations of mistreatment of Jews (many of them those retro red-state Orthodox types with a bias toward gays and feminists and an annoyingly clannish world view) against what we knew were the facts about Herr Hitler's administration of Germany -- a country grappling with shame and humiliation from the Versailles Treaty, and the aggressive encroachments of Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Poland, for example. We had to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations of the Teutonic "volk" and their need for "Lebensraum" when considering how we covered the German interaction with Jews.

Against this background, you need to also understand the tremendous pressures applied to publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Today's pressures that bear down on me are nothing -- nada -- compared to the pressures on Sulzberger. Every day, he faced potential ostracism when he visited "21" and the Stork Club, his private clubs and golf courses. Although he was an anti-Zionist Reform Jew, he still faced hailstorms of criticism from the "smart set." Whenever the paper mentioned a slaughter of Jews (two paragraphs, back with the Brooklyn crime stats and buyers' arrivals), a society swell on the "19th hole" would cock an eyebrow at Sulzberger and say, "I see you're still writing about your Jews in the paper, eh, Art? Come on, buy me a martini, you ol' Christ-killing rascal."

And it's not like the Jews of Europe were making much of a fuss. Where were the Jewish Che's or Arafats who could capture the imagination with their bold and fashionable presence? The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and we just didn't hear much squeaking coming from the Jews. Anyway, as they used to say regarding this issue in the newsroom back then, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Against the kind of relentless, soul-sapping opposition faced by Sulzberger and his editors, the Times did an exemplary job covering the Holocaust. And in the "less is more" mode, I'm firmly convinced that by keeping a measured, non-hysterical, reasonable approach, the Times succeeded in not exacerbating Herr Hitler's ire. What could be accomplished by public exposure that quiet, multilateral, sensitive negotiations couldn't? Leading the way for the rest of the American press, the Times' approach "kept the lid" on Herr Hitler and prevented his treatment of the Jews from becoming even more unpleasant than it was. Many people in the Hamptons have told me they appreciated our "shhhhhh, don't make waves" stance from that era.

I would also like to point out that our coverage of massacres emphasized the multicultural aspect of the Holocaust as it happened. It wasn't just the Jews, or even mostly the Jews, who were slaughtered, but a veritable rainbow coalition of Russians, Poles, Balts, and others. I'm proud that the Times was multi-culti before multi-culti was cool. [note to self: Did Herr Hitler oppress blacks or Latinos? Worth investigating!! Mention to Sharpton at lunch next week.]

Subsequent revelations and changes in reporting, alas, proved the sagacity of our approach. All that reporting about death camps, six million dead, Jews this and Jews that -- the next thing you know, people got so excited by what they read that the Zionists went against everything Sulzberger believed in and started the State of Israel. And that led to the oppression of Palestinians, those irksome "Salute to Israel" parades, domestic terrorism [note to self: McVeigh Jewish? Better ask Sharpton about that, too], and a very mixed bag of results indeed.

Of course, reasonable people of good will may differ with these views, and they have that right, although they are sadly misinformed and probably Republican bloggers guilty of hate crimes. The public's right to know has limits, especially in the face of competing interests. Our Holocaust coverage "got it right" in the face of those pressures, just as our coverage of the NSA and SWIFT programs "got it right."

I'd like to continue this cri de coeur, but my secretary just buzzed to say that some pleasant ladies and gents from the Justice Department and FBI have popped by for an open-ended chat [note to self: try to impress them with tour of Pulitzer Prize trophy case].