IT NOW LOOKS as if the election year will be bland, but you couldn't have guessed that last fall. At that time, it seemed as if the 1976 presidential election might pit Nelson Rockefeller against Hubert Humphrey, a struggle that could only have been designed by the collaborating imaginations of R. Crumb and Karl Marx. "Big Capital squares off against Big Labor in a duel to the death! The executive committee of the bourgeoisie casts off the hypocritical veil of congressional government and campaigns in its own name, while the section of the labor movement which has reached only trade union consciousness presses for its share of the surplus! The boff 'em, sock 'em bout of the century!"

Of course, things haven't worked out that way. Humphrey, in his exuberance, sabotaged hit-man Scoop Jackson in Pennsylvania, which, as it turns out, was the last place rival Democrats could have stopped Carter. And the scenario that could have allowed for a Rockefeller candidacy--a series of Ford defeats by Reagan in the early primaries, knocking the incumbent out, thereby legitimizing Rockefeller's entry--never materialized.

Michael Kramer and Sam Robert's new book doesn't cover much new ground, tending to concentrate on events which are already public knowledge. The authors focus on the specific role of Rockefeller in those incidents through interviews with his aides and enemies and through a commendably exhaustive investigation into the public record. The result is a highly readable, entertaining acount of his political career.

However, the book fails to provide some sort of understanding about what was going on within the Republican Party during the 1960s. Rockefeller often says that if he had been a Democrat, he would've been president long ago. This claim is an overstatement. Within the scope of his own career Rockefeller has demonstrated such consistent insensitivity to the mood of the national electorate that it is unlikely he could have succeeded with any party. But it's also true that a shift took place within the GOP; power was moving to the string of Southern and Western states that constitute the sunbelt. That area was the main beneficiary of the post-WW II boom, still unhibited by the countervailing force of strong trade-unionism. Rockefeller stumbled upon this split by accident, purely out of his search for a political base. But he came down on the wrong side of it and thereby alienated a segment of the GOP capable of denying him the nomination forever.

There was no doubt from the beginning of Rockefeller's career in 1958 as to his final goal. As he himself put it before the '64 campaign, "I'm a politician. That is my profession. Success in politics, real success, means only one thing in America." The prevalent wisdom in that first gubernatorial campaign in 1958 against Averill Harriman was that Rockefeller had only gained his family's approval for his venture into politics on the condition that he would be in the White House within ten years.

Rockefeller gained the Republican nomination for governor with his favorite device--polls. His showed that he ran best among possible GOP candidates against Harriman, though he would lose heavily too, and therefore the nomination was hardly anything worth fighting for. In this way he whittled down the opposition of the state's powerful Republicans like Thomas Dewey who were suspicious of his ambition and his money. The contest of 1958 presented the ideal face for him; against Harriman, the Union Pacific heir, the issue of personal fortune was relatively muted. Rockefeller won by more than half a million votes, outspending Harriman by a bout that many dollars in that Battle of the Millionaires.

In his 1960 non-campaign for the presidency, Rockefeller demonstrated an insensitivity to the GOP establishment, that, while only mildly harmful then, would prove fatal to his political life four years later. He roamed around the world with little on his mind but fallout radiation (Nehru would remark later, "...a very strange man...all he wants to talk about is bomb shelters"), an issue which carried the implication that Eisenhower had been soft with the Russians. He entered the campaign an outsider and left a bad loser--in his final declaration of non-candidacy, Rockefeller avoided endorsing the only serious candidate left in the field, Richard Nixon. In the minds of GOP pros, Rockefeller was forever marked as a man whose personal ambition took precedence over party unity.

In 1962, after re-election over a weak opponent, Rockefeller seemed to have a lock on the upcoming presidential nomination of his party for president. In preparation, he sought to refurbish his image a conservative, accusing President Kennedy of appeasing the Russians by not allowing Cuban exiles to stage raids against Castro. The polls showed Rockefeller the favorite among Republicans over Goldwater by a margin of 43 to 26 per cent. Only an act of incredible naivete could stop him. Rockefeller provided it by marrying Happy Murphy, fast upon the heels of his divorce from Mary Todhunter Clark. Virtually overnight his lead over Goldwater reversed itself; Goldwater now led him in the polls by 40 to 29 per cent.

Rockefeller was stunned, apparently having been caught completely off-guard by the public reaction. He needed a new issue now to get himself back into the race. He discovered this issue in the "radical right" of the Republican Party, which he denounced vociferously in his Bastile Day Declaration of July 14, 1963. His move was perceived as too bold, too divisive even in the moderate ranks of the party--Eisenhower, Nixon, George Romney and William Scranton all disassociated themselves from his position.

If Rockefeller had kept his mouth shut, he might very well have won the nomination despite the remarriage. The Kennedy assassination and the emergence of Lyndon Johnson seemed to negate the possibilities of success for Goldwater's southern strategy. As it was, the moderates had no candidate who could present himself as a unifier, and besides, Rockefeller's initial salvo had been returned with vengeance by the Goldwater faction, culminating in a 15-minute round of boos for him at the Cow Palace.

Nixon observed the workings of that convention closely and came out of it understanding what he'd have to do and whom he had to court to get the nomination in four years. He spent the intervening time campaigning for local Republican candidates, particularly in the sunbelt, picking up IOU's wherever he went. So when Rockefeller emerged with his inevitable polls showing him beating Johnson in '68, it hardly mattered--Nixon had the GOP county chairmen. Rockefeller tried to offset Nixon's advantage with a $4.6 million media blitz and a new set of polls. But after the assassination of Robert Kennedy it was too late--Nixon had run in the primaries, and Rockefeller was trying to run in thepolls. The party leaders resented it.

That debacle probably convinced Rockefeller that there was no future in Eastern Establishment positions. Rockefeller has compensated with a vengeance for his earlier heresies, breathing reactionary rhetoric with the worst of them. He pushed through a one-year residency rule for welfare recipients in 1970, bragging later that "I decided to get the cheats and chiselers off the taxpayers' back." This action was followed by repressive (and ineffective) mandatory sentencing measures for drug dealers and users, as well as the Attica murders.

Nothing helped though. Rockefeller remained anathema to Republicans from Florida to California. A visit of the "new" Rockefeller to the Mississippi GOP served to change its burning hatred for him into hatred.

Nor would his conversion to conservatism ever be totally convincing because of the structural demands of the governorship of New York. His effectiveness there depended on his ability to get along with the state's labor leaders, precipitating such moves as his refusal to call out the National Guard during the 1967 garbage strike in New York City. And in order to guarantee re-election in 1970 in his overwhelmingly Democratic state, Rockefeller was forced to take liberal positions on abortion, the 18-year-old vote, and mass transit.

Kramer and Roberts are at their best when describing the way in which Rockefeller made New York work for him, his forte. The reader senses in their attitude towards him a cynicism bordering on awe, at his ability to terrify, dispence patronage, impress, and when necessary, buy outright, whatever and whomever he wanted in the state. Strangely, it was these very qualities that prevented him from getting the only thing he really wanted. Given the changing character of the Republican Party, winning it would have required a humility and sensitivity that it is perhaps unreasonable to expect from a Rockefeller.