What was going on when I was born?

About 11 P.M. Tuesday, after a long, bruising day of trench warfare with Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., the White House was uncertain whether he would resign. Dave Gergen, a top White House official, telephoned William Dyess, an aide to Mr. Haig, to ask: ''Is he or isn't he?'' It was a pivotal moment in a bureaucratic battle that almost turned the first-ranking member of the Reagan Cabinet into its first political fatality, the victim partly of his own urge to take full command in an Administration where the President reserves that power to himself and expects from his Cabinet the collegial give-and-take of team play. The showdown was over power and prerogatives rather than over policies. Mr. Haig shares Mr. Reagan's broad foreign policy objectives. But his confrontational assertiveness rubbed against the more relaxed style of the President, who apparently had promised his Secretary of State more authority than he really wanted to surrender to any one man, and then shied away from curbing Mr. Haig until he himself felt challenged.

Phil Mahre of Yakima, Wash., today became the first American to win the World Cup, which has been awarded the last 15 years to the skier who accumulates the most points from 31 downhill, slalom and giant slalom races. The series is held over a four-month span in 10 countries. By finishing second in the giant slalom here today, behind Aleksandr Zhirov of the Soviet Union, Mahre earned 9 points, enough to pass Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden, who won the trophy in 1976, 1977 and 1978. Stenmark was leading the overall standing before today's final event.

ACONTROVERSIAL Army Corps of Engineers proposal to bury the 15 existing rock groins in Westhampton Beach - jetties built by the corps to prevent coastal erosion but not believed to accelerate it in adjacent areas - has been blocked by Suffolk County's refusal to approve the $42 million project. County Executive Peter F. Cohalan said he would not approve Suffolk's 9 percent share of the cost because ''the people who would be paying for it would derive little or no'' benefit from the project. By Federal law, all projects undertaken by the Corps of Engineers must be approved by the state and county involved. In addition, the state is required to pay 21 percent of the local cost and the county 9 percent; the remaining 70 percent is paid by the Federal Government.

JAMES L. EMERY, who succeeded Perry B. Duryea of Montauk as the Assembly minority leader and would like to succeed him as a Republican gubernatorial candidate against Governor Carey, has established a political foothold on the Island, the home turf of another G.O.P. gubernatorial prospect, Court of Appeals Judge Sol Wachtler. Mr. Emery has dispensed considerable patronage to the Suffolk Republican organization, a move that could prove to be a counter to the solid Nassau Republican organization support of Judge Wachtler, a Great Neck resident. Mr. Emery, a Geneseo Republican, has named the Conservative Party's county chairman, Neil A. Greene; the Babylon Town Conservative leader, Pasquale Curcio, and the Smithtown Republican chairman, Frank Apollaro, to what Republicans describe as ''seldom show'' jobs in his regional office at the State Office Building in Hauppauge. The two Conservatives are paid $9,300 each annually, while Mr. Apollaro's salary is $15,938. Other Republicans on the Emery payroll in Suffolk are Barbara Labrador, who heads the Suffolk office and is paid $20,280 annually; Diana McKenna, a secretary, $10,036, and Thomas Neppell, the former Brookhaven G.O.P. leader, who is being kept on the payroll for state fringe benefits, $2,470. John Galla, a holdover from the Duryea era, who was paid $17,940, left the Emery staff last month.

The Reagan Administration is planning major changes in the way national parks are operated, including granting increasing power in running the parks to private concessionaires and possibly divesting the system of urban parks such as the Gateway National Recreation Area in the New York metropolitan region. President Reagan's budget would eliminate all funds for the acquisition of new park lands that have been authorized by Congress. But the Department of the Interior, under Secretary James G. Watt, is planning other far-reaching policy decisions on how the parks are operated and how the system is administered. To turn the urban parks over to state or local government, or to drop parts of other parks through sales or land swaps, which is also a possibility, the Park Service would have to ask Congress for enabling legislation. Such an effort almost certainly would be opposed on Capitol Hill by environmental groups and probably by municipalities that do not want the task of operating the parks.

TAR BABY By Toni Morrison. 306 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $11.95. ANOVELIST'S vice usually resembles his virtue, for what he does best he also tends to do to excess: if he's good at being lyrical, he's too lyrical; if a cruel fate or accident seems to attend each character's childhood, that doom announces itself like a gun going off too long before the bullet's arrival. Our best and most ambitious writers indulge their vices as freely as their virtues; they are unafraid of them and think it small-minded to exercise restraint. Thomas Hardy, for instance, much maligned for the preachy element in his prose - his instructions to mankind that intrude upon his narrative like a voice over a loudspeaker in the midst of some public crisis - chooses not to describe Tess d'Urberville's deflowering as if it affected only one victim; instead he addresses a larger injustice, which may be what many readers dislike in Hardy - especially today - but this is also what makes Hardy Hardy.

The blastoff of the space shuttle next month will be a benchmark in the history of warfare, in the view of Pentagon officers and military strategists. Leaving aside the considerable scientific and commercial aspects of shuttle flights, which are the ostensible reasons for the investment of some $8 billion in the reusable space vehicle, military planners say the launching will mark the start of manned military operations at altitudes that will start with the shuttle at 200 miles and go to virtually any height imaginable. Almost from the first planning and investment in the shuttle program a decade ago it was widely recognized on Capitol Hill that the major long-range benefits would be from military applications. Protests From Soviet Union This view has not gone unnoticed in Moscow, where Soviet leaders have vigorously protested the continuing development of the American space plane as a provocation, and have unsuccessfully sought to negotiate its halt. The Soviet Union was well aware that early in the process of designing the shuttle, its cargo bay was enlarged at the urging of the Air Force to accommodate military payloads. At a length of 122 feet and with a wing span of 78 feet, the shuttle is about the size of a DC-9 jetliner. With two pilots and as many as three technicians it could stay in space for a week or more.

''Six years ago I'd never have dreamed that I would have my own million-dollar business, own two Mercedes and be building a country house in the Hamptons for more than $300,000. But things have changed. And since I don't know how long the good times will last, I'm doing it all now.'' In her mid-30's, Geraldine Bauer, a self-made single businesswoman who was a waitress before she opened a commercial photography laboratory six years ago in Manhattan, is caught up in the surge of real-estate activity now under way in the Hamptons. Running counter to a national trend that last month saw housing starts decreased by 25 percent, construction -especially of luxury homes - is on the rise in this resort area. The number of resale transactions is also up, according to brokers, although modest homes, priced under $80,000, have been slow to sell.

TRENTON NEW fronts in the state's sex-education battle opened last week, with Roman Catholic bishops and the Moral Majority in opposite camps. One anti-sex education bill has just been released by an Assembly committee and is ready for a floor vote; a second will be introduced soon in that house. Under a mandate approved by the State Board of Education last August, sex-education classes would become a regular part of all public-school curriculums as of September 1983. The mandate requires local school districts to develop their own programs in the following areas of instruction: - Emotional, psychological and physical aspects of interpersonal relationships.

For first time in the history of the city, most of new luxury housing projects that are beginning to take shape are condominiums, not rentals or cooperatives. While there have been only a handful of condominium projects - such as Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue at 51st Street - in New York City, condominiums are common elsewhere and have accounted for an increasing percentage of unsubsidized housing starts in the United States in recent years. The emerging popularity of the condominium with developers in New York City is a reflection of the reluctance of lenders to lock themselves into long-term commitments to cooperative apartment buildings. It also denotes the substantial growth of demand for condominium apartments by foreigners who have long been accustomed to such ownership forms and by corporations whose efforts to obtain residential spaces in cooperative buildings have often been thwarted by tax regulations. There is also more of a demand for condominiums by people who want to avoid the screening process of a cooperative apartment board.

Tap Shoes, whose trainer was changed, whose stride was straightened and who got over a bad skin rash last winter, passed Well Decorated with an eighth of mile to go today and won the $178,000 Flamingo Stakes at Hialeah Park. Tap Shoes covered the nine furlongs in 1:49 1/5 seconds under Ruben Hernandez and returned $3.20 for $2 to win to his backers in the crowd of 20,507. Well Decorated plugged on gamely for second, a length back, and Double Sonic was third, four lengths farther back. As it was for all in the field of seven, this was the longest distance Tap Shoes had been asked to run in his career. He had never raced around two turns, and his ease in negotiating the distance enhances the credentials he displayed today as a leading prospect for the Kentucky Derby on May 2.

ON a recent Sunday about 20 people from various parts of the state crowded into the small living room of the Bloomfield home of Kenneth and Renee Gere to listen to the latest about N.I.C.E. ''It wasn't all nice, but things seem to be going well,'' said Mr. Gere after the meeting, noting that: although more and more people were becoming attracted to the organization that he and his wife had created; although there was talk of creating N.I.C.E. chapters in other parts of the state; although N.I.C.E. was becoming more and more evident in Connecticut restaurants and turning up more often in municipal courts, there remained opposition. N.I.C.E. is an acronym for ''Nonsmokers Interested in a Clean Environment,'' and it was started by the Geres because they were upset by what they considered widespread nonobservance of a Connecticut law forbidding smoking in any but restricted sections of restaurants. Since mid-December, when they tested the law, and won, in the courts, their organization has grown. They have 100 people on their mailing list and have set up Box 554, Bloomfield, Conn. 06002 to handle an increased volume of mail. ''The response has been excellent,'' Mr. Gere said.