Twenty cents.

That was the subway fare in 1968, and politicians from New York City to Albany knew that the surest way to get voted out of office was to be seen as responsible for raising it.

So when Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and his deputy, William J. Ronan, made their gambit to seize control of the city’s transit system, they couched the move as an attempt to preserve the 20-cent fare.

But it was about more than that. It was a battle of egos, pitting the giant who had remade the city’s infrastructure, Robert Moses, against a governor insistent that the state take over the entire transportation network.

At the heart of the scheme proposed by Rockefeller and Ronan was a bold idea: Because the state controlled the tolls on the city’s bridges and tunnels, it could subsidize the subway and keep fares in check.