There are a couple of sure ways to get votes these days in Cambridge. One is to promise that you'll fight unrestricted development. The other is to claim that you're on the side of neighborhood preservation--that you'll battle for downzoning and against the Kennedy Library.

It wasn't always that way. From the 1930's to the 1960's, the word in Cambridge was "build"--high rises, university towers, hotels, offices, anything--and get them up as quickly as possible without protest. And the man most responsible for that legacy of development, as most Cantabridgians will tell you today, is Edward A. Crane '35.

Eddie Crane, poor son of a Cambridge cop, Harvard magna cum laude, city councilor for almost 30 years, was a power broker for as long as most Cambridge political experts can recall.

When Cambridge adopted its present from of government, Plan E--a good government instrument that attempts to separate city administration from politics by hiring a city manager to make up the budget and execute business--in 1939, few would have predicted that it would cause a vacuum of leadership that only a boss like Crane could fill.

Crane created a coalition that was built around keeping taxes down by any means--particularly growth by white collar industry. His strength lay in his ties--he felt at home with the universities, Harvard Square businessmen, Brattle Street dowagers, and working-class Cambridge.

By the mid-sixties, the other city councilors grew tired of his one-man rule. While Crane failed to detect the rumblings, he was ambushed and in 1966 a handful of councilors threw out his hand-picked city manager, virtually stripping him of his power. He stayed on to run again in 1967, but failed to finish in the top three and retired from politics.

Today Crane is more or less out of commission--a physically huge man, stuck behind a small desk in a tiny Boston law firm--far removed from the power scene that he once ruled. He's mellowed now too, given to reminiscing about his past triumphs, his friends, and most of all his final Brutus-like undoing at the hand of the liberals on the city council in 1966.

"When the bridge blew up in 1966, there weren't too many people throwing life-savers to me," Crane recalls. "They told me, 'Jesus, Ed, everybody knew you could swim.' Yeah, maybe, but the problem was when I swam, I didn't end up on the left bank."

Crane's reminisces serve as more than just a relic of the days when one man could run a city. They provide a unique contrast to the liberal neighborhood people that he says now play the major role in Cambridge politics.

"We were in a growth era then," Crane says--private growth, and a city's self-sufficiency were the city's primary goals. Now, he says, Cambridge is stagnating, and its council spends more time trying to get federal funds than attempting to build from within. "It's a Santa Claus-type government now," he says, "and nobody is going to object to getting federal funds."

"Rent control laws make it so nobody in his right mind will build an apartment house in Cambridge without a government subsidy," he' says. "We used to think in terms of encouraging building--but they don't anymore."

As for the claims of those who want to stop unrestrained development--downzone, and begin planning for people--Crane calls them all "ENE's"--ecologists and environmentalists--who prefer to stop rather than start things in Cambridge. "To me accusations of progress [under my administration] without planning are just wordy rhetoric. Any course of action is open for criticism in Cambridge nowadays." He claims that his administration "certainly endorsed planning." Witness the planning office, he says, which jumped from a $15 appropriation for postage stamps in 1938 to $186,000 by 1971. "Unrestrained development? There are not six square miles [the size of Cambridge] in this world that have been worked over more intensely by planners."

Instead of fighting for neighborhood preservation, Crane prefers to show what can happen when neighborhood preservers don't halt progress. He claims credit for Tech Square--"a tax payer"--the new Draper Labs, and a slew of other offices that are making money for Cambridge every day.

But nothing makes Crane seethe more than when the discussion turns to the Kennedy Library. Here is a project that makes him wish he was back on the council. "That JFK Library is a real ripoff. We spent over $50 million to make that site available for the library. And then the ENEs came in overnight. They started throwing their spears after we got the green light. They were well-represented, and well financed."

Crane looks upon those who opposed the library with disgust. He calls them a small, unrepresentative minority, who ramrodded their position through. Worse, to Crane, is that the opposition cares little for the memory of John F. Kennedy '40. He considers it a family insult, and he considers himself a close friend of that family.