What was going on when I was born?

AFTER more than a decade of debate about how to revamp the military's fleet of cargo planes, both Congress and the Pentagon seem determined to purchase the C-5B - a cargo carrier that is just about identical to an older, troubled and highly criticized plane made by the Lockheed Corporation. Which only goes to show, as a former Pentagon official recently wrote, that in Washington's wars of military procurement, it is better to be on Lockheed's side than against it. Lockheed is, indeed, a tough opponent. And after one of the hardest-fought lobbying efforts in some time, the aerospace company is just days away from signing a contract for 50 of these carriers - a $9 billion deal that would be the single largest military order in its history. When the ink is dry, Lockheed will have outflanked McDonnell Douglas and Boeing, its two biggest competitors, outsmarted some of the Capitol's leading Congressmen and demonstrated its ability to influence a government - one on the verge of its biggest military buildup ever. That ability to sway Washington's civilian leaders - even in the face of opposition from the military - may now be more crucial than ever for Lockheed. After a $466 million write-off for its now-defunct L-1011 Tristar passenger plane late last year and its virtual withdrawl from the commercial airline market, the company is counting on military orders for just about all of its business.

The National Football League labor negotiations remained snagged today, the 26th day of the players' strike, on two of the few remaining noneconomic issues. Through sessions early tonight, representatives of the Players Association and the league's Management Council, according to sources familiar with the negotiations, still had not agreed on the issues of the clubs' and the commissioner's rights with regard to player discipline and whether a new collective-bargaining agreement should include a clause on the right not to sue. The discipline issues, for establishing criteria for actions a club or the commissioner's office could take against a player judged to have impugned the integrity of the league, were introduced into the negotiations Friday. Sam Kagel, the 73-year-old mediator, asked the union to submit its proposal by 10 o'clock that night. He was finally given the proposal at 2 P.M. today, and 90 minutes later management responded to it. When the talks adjourned for a brief dinner break this evening, the issue had still not been resolved.

In just 10 months, Van Gordon Sauter has done more to change the face of CBS News than his three predecessors as president did in 15 years. Mr. Sauter replaced the executive producer of the evening news and overhauled its appearance; scuttled virtually everything on the morning news but Diane Sawyer, and introduced an entirely new broadcast; replaced bureau chiefs in a half-dozen cities; deemphasized news from Washington, D.C., and reshuffled major assignments in that bureau; and inaugurated five more hours of news programming weeknights between 2 and 7 A.M. The changes themselves are less notable than the spirit that motivated many of them. With a reputation as a fix-it man, the 48-year-old Mr. Sauter was hired last fall specifically to improve the news division's sagging ratings. To a division that had long prided itself on its no-frills approach to the news, Mr. Sauter introduced many of the cosmetic techniques he'd honed as a local news executive and as president of CBS Sports.

In the wake of the Long Island Lighting Company's announcement that the estimated cost of the Shoreham nuclear power station had risen beyond the $3 billion mark, financial analysts said last week that the utility's future financial health still depended on getting the plant into operation. There were signs that it may take longer to put Shoreham into operation than Lilco would like. These signs included the following: *New safety questions raised by the Suffolk County Executive, Peter F. Cohalan. Mr. Cohalan asserted that a serious "design error" involving certain backup pumps made a core melt more likely than Lilco had predicted. Mr. Cohalan said the problem was another example of the need for an independent on-site inspection at Shoreham. He and Lilco have been trading barbs for more than four months over who should be involved in such an inspection. "All Lilco has given us is sophomoric publicrelations propaganda," Mr. Cohalan said.

SEASIDE HEIGHTS THE weekend traffic jams of summer are a thing of the past, and on the Boulevard - the main north-south thoroughfare here - there is an embarassment of riches in parking spaces. Amusement rides have been silent since Labor Day and most boardwalk concession stands are open only on weekends, if at all. By early fall, this town, like other resort communities along the Jersey Shore, becomes a quiet place where its year-round residents - there are 1,800 here - can unwind and neighbors and friends get reacquainted. ''We love the crowds in the summer,'' said Tom Kennedy, Treasurer of Seaside Heights. ''They are our lifeblood. But in the fall, when the tourists and vacationists are gone, we really do get to enjoy our town again.''

New York is a crossroads for the great orchestras of the world, but a visit here by the Berlin Philharmonic remains a rarity. Its last concerts in New York came six years ago. This week, as part of its 100th birthday celebrations, the Philharmonic returns to Carnegie Hall for four long-since sold-out concerts under its music director since 1955, Herbert von Karajan. At this late stage of his career (he is 74 years old), Mr. Karajan is still widely recognized as a master of late Romantic repertory from Wagner through Shostakovich, and the first and fourth of the concerts at Carnegie will give us a taste of that repertory. Tuesday night, following Stravinsky's ''Apollo,'' there will be Richard Strauss's gorgeously excessive ''Alpine'' Symphony, and Saturday offers Mahler's Symphony No. 9. In between, Wednesday and Friday, Mr. Karajan and the orchestra will celebrate the 150th anniversary of Brahms's birth with the complete Brahms symphonies. (The orchestra will offer only four other concerts on this American tour, all in Pasadena, Calif., at the end of the month.)

IN October 1979, with great fanfare, the Federal Reserve embarked on a grand new experiment for managing m onetary policy. Now, with somewhat fewer flourishes, the Fed appearst o have suddenly turned from that course. Though the central bank justifies the latest change on purely technical grounds, to some observers - particularly politicians - the Fed's new tack, taken just weeks before the November elections, is suspect. ''If there are not any political considerations in the minds of the Fed, it is the most remarkable coincidence in history,'' comments Representative Henry Reuss, Democrat of Wisconsin, and chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. ''The Fed's record of trying to pull the Administration's chestnuts out of the fire is a long and not particularly edifying one, he added.''

After a quarter-century of mostly peaceful exploration of space, the United States has begun a vast expansion of its military operations there. In the next five years the Reagan Administration plans to increase spending on military operations in space even faster than the rest of the military budget. Better satellites are planned for highly sophisticated communications, intelligence gathering, navigation, weather forecasting and mapping. The space shuttle, having carried its first military payload, will replace rockets as the primary vehicle for lofting military cargoes into orbit. New Generation of Weapons The Administration has undertaken elaborate new measures to defend satellites and has ordered a ground-based antisatellite system to be ready by 1987. It has also stimulated research to develop a new generation of advanced weapons such as lasers, though officials say they do not plan to station weapons in orbit.

David Hare is tall, blond and smiling, the sort of ageless golden boy you can imagine striding with cricket bat and ball across the playing fields of the pukka school he did, in fact, attend as a teenager. But that elitist facade conceals perhaps the most original and arresting of the many left-wing young dramatists Britain has produced in recent years. As New York audiences will discover when ''Plenty'' opens Wednesday at the Public Theater, Mr. Hare is a writer profoundly and often eloquently at odds with the nation and class which gave him birth. ''Plenty'' concerns the war against Hitler and its aftermath. The English, the play suggests, emerged from the fray believing that before long the land would flow with milk and honey. Instead, it flowed with marketing men, advertising agencies, speculators in stocks, rah-rah patriots and quietly rapacious colonialists. Plenty was promised, less actually achieved. The embryonic idea for this play had come when Mr. Hare started to read in depth about World War II for an earlier work, ''Brassneck,'' about municipal corruption in Britain. ''I became convinced that it was a radicalizing war, and that Labor's election in 1945, far from being an aberration, was the absolutely logical result of people's experiences during the war,'' Mr. Hare said recently. ''There was a determination that the nation should be different, and gradually that determination was squandered. A legacy was wasted, and so were people's lives.'

The Reagan Administration has given France, West Germany, Britain and Italy a draft proposal that could serve as the basis for lifting United States sanctions involving the Siberian pipeline, Administration trade officials reported today. The officials, in agreeing to provide some details on the topsecret pipeline discussions, asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter. The proposal, which was distributed before the latest police clashes with workers in Poland, would commit the Governments to a fundamental review of alliance strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union and then commit them to identify specific pressure points, such as credit terms and technology transfers, that could be used as leverage in any linkage of trade with Soviet behavior. But division still exists between the Administration's foreign affairs and trade officers, on one side, and Cabinet hard-liners led by Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger over the question of what the Europeans would give in return for the lifting of the sanctions, the officials said. The hardliners are seeking a firm commitment from the Europeans not to contract for a second strand of the pipeline.

Decked out in lurid glad rags and a platinum-meringue coiffure, she sashays around the set like someone kicked out of charm school after the first rhumba lesson. When trying to be refined, her voice is a stratospheric tremolo; when peeved or distracted, it's a meaty baritone with the treble knob turned to maximum. In the 1950 film ''Born Yesterday,'' this is Judy Holliday as Billie Dawn, a very brainy piece of comic caricature - one of the most airily sustained the movies have ever captured. Everything about her is riotously antiphonal. As Billie hums a pop ditty in a key only canines could fathom, her hands move like assembly-line pistons as she blitzes her protector at gin rummy. The merry glitter in those round brown eyes betrays the fact that appearances to the contrary, Billie is no moron - just cheerily oblivious to anything that doesn't interest her. Yet Miss Holliday's real achievement was to persuade the audience that Billie could not only be bright, but also possessed some real feelings beneath that carborundum veneer.

With a chill autumn at hand and predictions of a hard winter to follow, the Consolidated Edison Company is about to open to the public an 80-year-old house in Bayside, Queens, that has been retrofitted with every practical conservation device and energyefficient appliances. According to John Blume, project manager, the house, at 212-14 42d Avenue, had never been insulated and lacked such newer conservation items as automatic-setback thermostats.