What was going on when I was born?

IRANIAN RIGHTISTS BREAK UP RALLY BY DEFIANT LEFT TEHERAN, Iran, Feb. 6 (By Reuters) - Five thousand Iranian leftists, demonstrating in central Teheran in defiance of a Government ban, were attacked by right-wing Islamic extremists today with rifles, knives and rocks. Thirty-nine people were reportedly treated for bullet or stab wounds after the clashes, which were said to have been ended by security forces. The demonstrators, from a Marxist-Leninist faction of the Fedayeen movement and the Marxist-Leninist Peykar group, at first converged on Azadi Square in the western part of the capital to protest the steady deterioration of the economy in the two years since rule by the Shah was ended. But Islamic revolutionary guards had already taken up positions at the square. They fired their weapons into the air, and the demonstrators moved to Tohid Square near the center of the city.

Ronald Reagan made his debut in ''The President's Surprise Party'' tonight, and he played his leading man's role to perfection. ''What's on for today?'' Mr. Reagan asked his special assistant, Helene von Damm, when he walked into his White House office on the morning of his 70th birthday. Eleven hours later, the former movie actor took his place in a production that would have impressed Darryl Zanuck. The cast: such Hollywood celebrities as Frank Sinatra and James Stewart, and more than 100 other friends of the President. The props: 12 birthday cakes, each topped with a jumping white horse and the initials R.W.R.

A new glut in world oil supplies may be developing, officials of Western governments and international oil companies say, and by summer more oil may be available to consumers than they require. Moreover, the growing supplies are putting pressure on some OPEC producers to cut back the surcharges they have added to their official oil prices. ''The thing that happened last year was that demand for oil was dropping much faster than anybody anticipated,'' a senior official of a West European government said in an interview. ''It flabbergasted virtually every Western government and all the major oil companies.''

Because of the drought emergency, the city is looking into the possibility of digging a well under Shea Stadium to supply the New York Mets with water to keep their ball park green. Both the Mets and the Yankees have been told that, when their seasons begin, they may be prohibited from watering the grass. There is already a well under Yankee Stadium that was used in the big drought of the 1960's.

About 500 of President Reagan's political supporters met here today in private sessions to plan a grass-roots campaign to put public pressure on Congress to approve Mr. Reagan's economic program. The meeting was organized by the President's ''kitchen cabinet,'' an informal advisory group that includes wealthy Californians who are longtime friends of Mr. Reagan. The main goals of the new ''coalition conference'' will be to encourage passage of the President's entire economic program without its being dismantled or significantly changed by Congress, according to Administration and Congressional sources. Charles Wick, the main organizer of the coalition, denied that the coalition was a ''pressure group,'' but other sources described its purpose in terms of political leverage.

The economy remained surprisingly strong last month despite continued very high interest rates, according to data released today in the Labor Department's monthly employment survey. The number of employed workers rose by 414,000 to 97,696,000 in January while the jobless rolls edged up by only 62,000 to 7,847,000, with the result that the overall unemployment rate remained unchanged at 7.4 percent. ''I think this shows that the economy has been quite resilient,'' said Bernard Schoenfeld, an economist who is vice president of the Irving Trust Company. ''Most people have been expecting the economy to fall apart, but most businesses have adapted relatively well.'' He added that this was one more indication that a new downturn since last spring's brief recession, which many economists have been awaiting, was still not in evidence.

The Communist authorities here are coming to realize an uncomfortable fact: control of the press may be exerted through censors, compliant editors and fainthearted journalists, but there are others who have a hand in the final product and they get the last crack at it - the printers. Angered by what they regard as a devious return to heavy-handed censorship, the printers have organized under the banner of the independent labor union, Solidarity, and are demanding a loosening of censorship by Tuesday. Otherwise, they say, Friday the 13th will be a day of no newspapers for Poland. They are in a position to make good on the threat, because about 50,000 of the country's 60,000 printers are members of Solidarity. They have won hefty raises and are among the union's most dedicated, militant and idealistic members.

''It's a little protection against rape,'' said Sister Christine Tan, indicating her habit and veil, as she and another nun walked through the teeming, ugly slum, one of the many that make up much of Manila, where she and five other nuns have chosen to live. ''Others may consider us rebels,'' said Sister Christine. ''We think we are just a little bolder.'' The nuns, all members of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd and ranging in age from their 30's to their 50's, settled in a commune outside their convent's walls two years ago. They are activists in a movement that has radicalized the Roman Catholic Church in this overwhelmingly Catholic country since the late 1960's.

PLEASE USE********; State Dept. Comments on Report On Arming of Salvadoran Rebels WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 (AP) - The State Department acknowledged today that it had received captured documents reporting large-scale Sovietbloc support for leftist guerrillas in El Salvador but said the documents' authenticity was not yet confirmed.

The State Department has sent instructions to United States embassy officials in Western Europe on how to respond to criticism stemming from reports of comments by Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger on the possible deployment of neutron warheads. In classified cables made public today, the department confirmed that the Reagan Administration was conducting a review of the Carter Administration's decision in 1978 to defer production of the weapon.

The leaders of France and West Germany issued a statement today declaring their readiness to cooperate with the Reagan Administration in a spirit of trust to meet the dangers of a deteriorating international climate. The declaration, which included a warning against any foreign intervention in Poland, came at the end of a two-day meeting between President Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. The two leaders, who originally intended to concentrate on a series of joint cultural and educational efforts, spent most of their time discussing two related political questions. One was the increasingly strained relations between the West and the Soviet Union. The other was the outlook for dealing with a new American President, toward whom the French attitude could be summed up as, hopeful if anxious, and the German attitude, anxious if hopeful.

The Rev. Ian Paisley, making a dramatic show of Protestant force, secretly gathered 500 men into a military formation on a bleak hillside in Northern Ireland late last night and vowed that they were prepared to fight ''to the death'' against reunification with the Irish Republic. ''This is only a small token of the many thousands of men who are pledged to me, and I pledged to them, to stand together at this time of grave trouble in Northern Ireland,'' declared Mr. Paisley, who is a member of the British Parliament and a leading political figure in the Protestant majority in the province. The midnight demonstration, which prompted angry allegations that Mr. Paisley was forming a private army to fight Roman Catholics, was the latest reflection of heightened tensions in the province. Sectarian violence increased after a Christmas lull, and yesterday prisoners who favor reunification threatened to stage a new hunger strike in support of their demand for political status.