R. BENJAMIN SPOCK is not a public figure, but he has more leverage on tomorrow than many men who are. In six years his 35-c- Pocket Book on baby care has sold more than 4,000,000 copies, which puts it in a class with the dictionary and the Bible. Millions of mothers regard him as an oracle, parents turn out 5,000 strong to hear him lecture, and other pediatricians joke that their main job is to interpret him. One mother stands a little in awe of her child because he was examined by the doctor in school. "I look at Henry," she told a friend, "and I think, he has seen Dr. Spock!" If their mothers are using as well as buying "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care," one of five newborn babies in the U.S. is a Spock baby.

Thirty years ago the main concern of parents was to keep their babies on schedule (regular on the bottle and on the pot), disciplined, and free of germs. Then the rules changed. Babies were to be treated as individuals from birth, cuddling was to be considered as important as cleanliness, and strong discipline a measure that can usually be avoided. Dr. Spock did not pioneer the new attitude, but he explained it better than anyone else by showing how it applies in a hundred commonplace situations, as when a baby takes up the habit of banging his head against the wall, or when a boy will eat only hamburgers, bananas and soda pop. The basic rule underlying all Spock's advice about children is simple: "Relax -- love and enjoy them."

When he began to write his book in 1943, Dr. Spock was 40, a father and successful Manhattan practitioner who had dosed himself with pediatrics, psychology and psychoanalysis while keeping a manner as easy and friendly as a country doctor's. He still has the crew cut, healthy good looks and spontaneous guffaw of a college boy, still manages his 6 ft. 4 in. with the lanky ease that helped send him to the Olympics in 1924 as one of the best oarsmen Yale ever produced. After college he got most of his exercise on the dance floor. With friends, he hired a hall and an orchestra for $1.50 weekly dances in Manhattan (known as Dr. Spock's Dancing Academy or the Don't Tread on Me Club). Once, at the stylish Persian Room, he danced so well with his attractive wife that everyone else edged off the floor to watch them.

He has few inhibitions and no intellectual pretensions. He likes to lecture informally, sitting on the edge of a table, and his earnestness and homely jokes win audiences varying from philanthropists to student doctors. When he wants to press a point with parents, he's a shameless exhibitionist, twisting his face with surprised disgust to imitate a baby spitting out the food crammed into it by a too-resolute mother.

SPOCK calls his lifework "preventive psychiatry." His book on baby care was conceived as a phase of that work and, like half a dozen other projects, was carried out in his spare time. He started it during a summer vacation and worked on it practically every night for two years, from nine until after midnight, dictating to his wife to give it an easy, conversational tone. He finished it after joining the Navy in 1944 as a psychiatrist in charge of severe disciplinary cases. When he got his overseas orders, the book had still to be indexed. The publishers urged him to leave the job to a professional, but Spock is a fussy man, and he felt he knew best what mothers would be looking for. So on the hot, week-long troop-train ride from New York to San Francisco, while a beer party flowed at one end of his Pullman and a petty officer noisily snored in the seat opposite, Lieut. Commander Spock patiently indexed away, his lap lost under galley proofs and long sheets which slowly filled up with 1,500 entries like "Bottle feeding--bubbling," and "Bedtime--keeping it happy." Part of Spock's drive stems, perhaps, from the fact that he was not a Spock baby himself. His father was a successful New Haven lawyer who resembled and respected Calvin Coolidge, and his mother was a forceful New England woman with strict views. She prides herself on having brought up her six children with toe-the-line discipline. "If all parents today were as strict as I was, we wouldn't have so many brats and little vandals," she says. Ben was seldom allowed to do what most other boys did, and he suffered accordingly. He and his younger sister Hitty were sent to a small fresh-air school where they sat in felt bags on cold days, emerging at intervals to warm themselves by folk dancing on a wooden platform. Even at ten Ben towered over his contemporaries, and his folk dancing was a favorite entertainment of the boys in the nearby public school, who came to the windows expressly to enjoy it. Ben was mortified, but not Mrs. Spock. "Don't pay any attention to them," she told him. "You know you are right." His unconventional and Spartan childhood apparently did Ben little harm, but he considers this no argument for inflicting the same kind of thing on others. "It's all right if you survive," he says. "Too many don't." He spent much of his boyhood cringing or running away from something, but his well-trained legs proved useful at Andover, where he made the track team and, in general, caught up with the rest of the boys. At Yale he was a social success. At medical school he rose to the head of his class. He was one of the first doctors to intern in both pediatrics and psychiatry.

But it looked in 1933 as though no one wanted a pediatrician with or without psychiatry. For several years Spock failed to make enough money to pay his Manhattan office rent. Then, one by one, patients came, and both mothers and children throve on the friendliness and reassurance of the young doctor who was as interested in finding out how a boy got along with his new baby sister as he was in giving inoculations. He was something of a presence, especially to little girls. "When he patted the glands in your throat, you felt you'd been blessed," one ex-patient remembers with a sigh. He wore a business suit rather than a white coat which might seem strange to little children, and he made a game of their regular checkups--designing a special structure up which they willingly scrambled to be on and thumped. His enormous practice wasn't built on gadgets, however, but on a simpler secret: that it's just as important to give mothers confidence as it is to give them advice.

A little boy, for example, may stop wetting the bed if his mother can talk out her fears to the doctor and become convinced that she's doing an important job well.

DR. SPOCK no longer takes private patients. A year ago he became Professor of Child Development in the medical school of the University of Pittsburgh, with a free hand to inject a shot of child psychiatry wherever he can in the city. Directly or indirectly, he reaches thousands of children in schools, clinics, and hospitals. He likes to work with only a few people at a time, and can often be found in a basement room of a city public-health center, sitting in a circle of painted wooden chairs with a dozen a workers, nurses, doctors and interns, balancing a coffee cup on his knee and discussing why one child doesn't get along well in school or why another catches so many colds.

Some doctors point out that much of his advice is intuitive, since little is known about the emotional life of children. A few mothers complain that he makes things sound too easy. But the book sales click along as steadily as the birth rate, and Dr. Spock gets a daily drift of thank-you letters from grateful parents. Their children have yet to be heard from.

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