What was going on when I was born?

The executive directors of three city hospitals - Harlem, Cumberland and Elmhurst - are being replaced, the president of the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation disclosed yesterday. Stanley Brezenoff, who was named president of the corporation last March, said in an interview that he had asked for the resignations of Inder Persaud of Cumberland, which is in Brooklyn, and Marvin Durrell of Elmhurst, in Queens, as part of a series of changes contemplated in personnel and structure of the agency for greater efficiency. Mr. Brezenoff said Dr. Anthony Summers, the acting director of Harlem Hospital, has withdrawn his name from consideration for a permanent appointment. He withdrew after corporation officials said they had learned that he had used $2,000 in Harlem Hospital's budget to provide a summer job for his son at another hospital, Mr. Brezenoff said.

President Reagan has invited Democratic Congressional leaders to the White House on Monday for a ''last chance'' meeting on a tax compromise White House officials said today. If the meeting shows no basis for compromise, several White House sources said, Mr. Reagan was prepared to move in two directions. They said he would seek a legislative alliance with the conservative Southern Democrats who helped him pass his budget reductions and begin a ''public outreach effort'' to create voter demand for passage of his tax reductions. In what his advisers described as a final effort to work out a compromise on the tax plan, Mr. Reagan has set 11 A.M. Monday for a meeting with House Speaker Thomas J. O'Neill Jr.; Representative Jim Wright, the House majority leader; Representative Dan Rostenkowski, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; Robert C. Byrd, Senate minority leader, and Senator Russell B. Long, the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

The Air Force tonight arrested one of its missile-launching officers at an air base in Kansas and charged him with making three unauthorized visits to the Soviet Union's Embassy here. The Strategic Air Command identified the officer as Second Lieut. Christopher M. Cooke, 25 years old, of Richmond, who has been assigned to the Titan missile complex at McConnell Air Force Base near Wichita, Kan., since last June.

Leaders of the United Mine Workers today approved a proposed agreement to end a strike by 160,000 coal miners, quickly accepting the terms negotiated with the mine operators early this morning. At a news conference this afternoon, Sam M. Church Jr., the union's president, called the agreement ''probably the best that will be negotiated this year in any industry.'' He said that the agreement, running to October 1984, would give U.M.W. members a 38 percent increase in wages and benefits and include most of the provisions whose omission in a previous settlement led to its rejection by the rank and file. The 36-to-2 vote today by the union's bargaining council, a tally then made unanimous, seemed to give the new tentative settlement a better chance of ratification by the soft-coal miners, who struck 64 days ago. A secret-ballot vote by the membership is scheduled for June 6.

President Reagan's special envoy, Philip C. Habib, said today that he believed a negotiated end to the crisis in the Middle East was ''achievable,'' but he cautioned Syria and Israel against continuing to build up combat forces along the Lebanese border. Speaking to reporters at the White House after conferring with Mr. Reagan and other senior officials on his three weeks of shuttling between Israel, Syria and Lebanon, with a side trip to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Habib said he would return to the Middle East next week. When he began his mission in the Middle East May 7, he said, it looked as if war would erupt between Syria and Israel over Syrian antiaircraft missiles in Lebanon. Syria began deploying the missiles in eastern Lebanon April 29, the day after Israeli jets shot down two Syrian helicopters. Israel immediately demanded that the missiles be withdrawn.

On May 9, Michael K. Deaver, the White House deputy chief of staff, gave President Reagan a memorandum containing the State Department's recommendations for several key ambassadorial appointments. At the bottom of the list was a name Mr. Deaver had himself added: Joseph V. Reed Jr. Mr. Reed, a longtime confidential aide to David Rockefeller, was recommended for appointment as Ambassador to Morocco. Mr. Reagan approved the appointment along with the others, and pending a routine security check that is now under way, Administration officials say, the 43-year-old aide of the recently retired chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank will be the next American Ambassador in Rabat. The story of his selection provides insights into how some ambassadors are actually chosen. In theory, under procedures established at the outset of the Reagan Administration, the names of prospective ambassadors reach the President only after careful screening by committees composed of senior officials in the State Department and the White House. In many cases, however, including this one, personal entreaties by politically influential patrons, intercession by a close personal aide to the President and other factors can effectively circumvent the normal bureaucratic process.

There is a brief time, between the promises of the campaign and the long haul of trying to make a mark on reality, when a new Government has a moment to present itself. This is done through its appointments, its first measures, usually symbolic, and its first words. These, in different ways, are all signs. Through them the Government says what it would like to be, as opposed to its campaign version of what it thinks the voters would like it to be or what reality will compel it to be in the future. The most conspicuous thing, a week after Francois Mitterrand became the first Socialist President of the Fifth Republic, is cheerful confusion and unsettled dust. The Minister of Environment cannot find a place for his offices, and there seem to be two, or possibly three, official presidential press representatives and a host of unofficial ones. Newly important people are unexpectedly free for lunch, not because they have nothing to do but because they have so much that it is stuck on its way up to them.

Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, addressing the national convention of his Free Democratic Party, asserted today that cuts in West Germany's social welfare budget were unavoidable, a position that could lead to conflict with his Social Democratic partners in the governing coalition. Budget deficits have made reductions in public spending a necessity, Mr. Genscher, the Free Democrats' leader, told an enthusiastic crowd at the party congress in Cologne. ''Cosmetic operations are not enough,'' he added.

The State Department announced today that France's new Foreign Minister, Claude Cheysson, would visit Washington next week. His visit will provide the first opportunity for the Reagan Administration to meet a representative of the new Government of President Francois Mitterrand. A department spokesman, David D. Passage, said that Mr. Cheysson would call on Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. and other top officials during his visit next Thursday and Friday.

The Soviet press has recently made an unusually harsh series of attacks on Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and West German correspondents in Moscow, quoting diplomatic sources, said the criticism was unlike anything seen in the Soviet media in Mr. Schmidt's seven years in office. Some of the diplomatic reports have speculated about the possibility of a serious deterioration in West German-Soviet relations. A more current analysis among officials in Bonn was that Moscow was trying to increase pressure on the Chancellor and encourage those in his party who are seeking to block deployment in West Germany of NATO's new medium-range nuclear missiles. The main attack was in an unsigned article in Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, but other, similar commentaries were carried by Tass, the Soviet press agency, and by the weekly Novoye Vremya.

The official Soviet press agency Tass today described President Reagan's meeting yesterday with the wife of Anatoly B. Shcharansky, the imprisoned Soviet dissident, as interference in Moscow's internal affairs. A senior commentator said Avital Shcharansky traveled the world specializing in anti-Soviet slander. Mr. Reagan had a 30-minute meeting with her in the White House and promised to do all he could to obtain the release of her husband.

The United States will work to end South Africa's isolation if that nation cooperates in achieving an internationally acceptable settlement for the independence of South-West Africa, according to purported State Department documents made available today. The documents, which include position papers apparently submitted by South Africa, are consistent with the Reagan Administration's publicly stated policy favoring closer ties with South Africa than those that existed during the Carter Administration. But Tthe documents provide an unusual look into the Administration's thinking. The key documents were prepared before South Africa's Foreign Minister, Roelof F. Botha, visited Washington two weeks ago. After talking with Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., Mr. Botha said there was ''a real possibility of moving ahead'' on the question of South-West Africa. The territory, also called Namibia, is administered by South Africa in defiance of the United Nations.