Spock on Spock

Guru of permissive parenting to a generation, the author of Baby and Child Care turns out to have been a fairly strict parent himself. Spock, now 86, was an obedient pupil at a New Haven ``open-air'' experimental school in 1912, a woefully inexperienced lover at Yale, a reluctant convert to the anti-Vietnam War movement, in which he played a key role. Coauthored with his wife, this mild, easygoing autobiography shows Spock molded by a domineering, hypercritical, punitive mother and a distant father, but gradually breaking free from his parents' conditioning. He tells of his 1968 trial on charges of abetting draft resisters, his campaign for the U.S. presidency as People's Party candidate in 1972, his two marriages, all in a down-to-earth, engaging style. Photos. (Nov.)