FERRARO: <i> My Story</i> by Geraldine A. Ferraro with Linda Bird Francke (Bantam: $17.95; 340 pp.)

Scattered through Geraldine A. Ferraro’s memoir of her campaign for the vice presidency, there are, as there were during the campaign itself, frequent allusions to the idea of history.

Feminist leader Betty Friedan assured Democratic standard-bearer Walter F. Mondale that he could give his campaign “historical resonance” by choosing a woman running mate. After Mondale decides to do just that, Ferraro asks her staff: “How does it feel to be a part of history?” And looking back on her role in the landslide Democratic defeat, Ferraro writes: “Historically, I had no regrets.”

But there is a distinction between making the Guinness Book of Records and making history, a distinction which appears to escape Ferraro and her partisans. Certainly, historical forces were at work in the 1984 campaign--the final collapse of the old New Deal coalition and the apparent stalling of the dramatic 20-year surge in the feminist movement. But Ferraro’s candidacy, for all the pretentions surrounding it, touched only peripherally on these dynamics.

In this regard, her memoir is instructive because it is a reasonably faithful reflection of her candidacy, heavily tinged with self-indulgence and self-pity. She makes little effort to conceal the flaws and distortions in her candidacy, perhaps because she does not recognize them as such.

Indeed, she unwittingly undermines the chief arguments that have been offered to justify her choice in the eyes of history--that she would help her party’s candidate win the presidency and, win or lose, promote the interests of women. But history demonstrates that vice presidential choices, whatever their gender, rarely have much impact on election outcomes, a point Ferraro acknowledges. “Few, very few people vote for a president based on who his vice president will be,” she writes. As for the cause of women, as opinion polls and common sense had suggested and the election results confirmed, most women were less concerned with such so-called women’s issues as ERA and abortion, which Ferraro’s candidacy symbolized, than with the fact that the nation was at peace and the economy was humming, circumstances for which they credited President Reagan. Swallowing hard over the returns that showed more women voting for the GOP ticket than for the Democrats, Ferraro writes: “It demeans women to think that they would vote in a mindless block just because of their gender--or a candidate’s gender.”

But it was a little late for such high-minded caveats. In a “now it can be told” chapter, Ferraro reveals that long before the Democratic convention, in the summer of 1983, she had allowed herself to be persuaded by a small group of women active in Democratic politics to be the focal point of their efforts to get a woman on the ticket in 1984. They clinched their case, supposedly, with a tailor-made Chinese fortune cookie prophecy: “You will win big in 1984.” With her blessing and assistance, the campaign went quietly but relentlessly forward, first promoting the idea of a woman vice president in the media, then getting specific attention focused on Ferraro and later helping her gain the strategically prominent post of convention platform committee chairman.

As she tells the story, Ferraro had doubts about the enterprise from the start, holding to the belief that the male-dominated Democratic leadership would never pick a woman “unless they are way behind.” She turned out to be exactly right; Mondale was 15 points behind in the polls when he picked Ferraro for No. 2. But it does not seem to have occurred to her to wonder whether a choice made in such desperation could benefit either her party or the feminist cause she espoused.

After it was all over, Ferraro professes to be most gratified by a poll in which 64% of those interviewed said the 1984 election would have no bearing, one way or another, on whether they voted for a woman. “That is the most significant figure,” she asserts. “For this dominant percentage, the gender of the candidate had become irrelevant.” But then what was the point of Ferraro’s candidacy, since apart from her sex, she certainly had few other claims to attention.

What makes this book hard to take at times is the same steady whine of complaint that ran through her campaign. “Never have so many people spent so much time and money trying to discredit the second slot on a presidential ticket,” she contends, and time and again she protests the “viciousness” of the personal attacks on herself and her husband, John Zaccaro. But it was Ferraro who, by making her personal attributes--her Catholic faith, her Italian origins, her sex--the dominant features of her candidacy, paved the way for the attacks. And it was Ferarro, by her sloppiness in handling her Congressional finances, and Zaccaro by his sharp practices as a real estate operator, who provided their critics with much of their ammunition.

As the male chauvinists in the back rooms used to say: “If you play political hardball, don’t complain when you get beaned.”