The first surprise on delving back into Dr. Spock on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Baby and Child Care is that his much-denounced ” permissiveness” is scarcely to be found. Peruse the pages of this record bestseller — still second only to the Bible — and you discover much practical sense and little talk of laissez faire. Ask around among the young parents you know, and plenty who call themselves conservative will describe Spock’s book as handy and congenial. Consult your own personal favorite child- rearing authority, Marguerite Kelly, author of The Mother’s Almanac, and she shrugs, “Frankly, I never could see what the fuss was all about.”

The fuss, of course, was fixed in the national consciousness in 1968, when that icon of upstandingness the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale branded Spock the teacher of “instant gratification.” And not surprisingly, the charge stuck: By then, the world’s most famous pediatrician had come down with a bad case of peacenik politics at the unseasonable age of 59, making him a natural target. At the time of Peale’s jeremiad, Dr. Spock was not merely a tireless antiwar demonstrator and speaker on college campuses, he had actually been indicted for conspiring to stymie the draft. To Americans repelled by the street politics of the day, Peale’s theory had a satisfying plausibility: The baby boomers had been first spoiled, then radicalized, by the rather ridiculous Benjamin Spock.