What was going on when I was born?

A daylong standoff between the police and a man who threatened to blow up the Washington Monument with a truck he said contained explosives ended Wednesday night with a flurry of gunshots. Forty-five minutes after the shooting, which occurred about 7:35 P.M., the police, acting cautiously because the man had said his truck carried 1,000 pounds of dynamite, removed a fatally wounded man from the vehicle that for 10 hours had been parked at the entrance to the monument. Early today, the District of Columbia Medical Examiner's office identified the dead man as Norman David Mayer, 66 years old, a former maintenance man from Miami Beach. The Washington Metropolitan Police Department also said that despite a four-hour search of the monument, there was no evidence that a second suspect might be hiding inside, as they had earlier believed. They also said their search found no explosives.

The Federal Communications Commission today authorized RKO General Inc. to move its New York City station - WOR-TV on Channel 9 - to New Jersey, giving the state its first commercial very-high-frequency television station. The new station would bring significantly more New Jersey news and public affairs programs to the state, the owners said. Until now, New Jersey VHF viewers - the vast majority of television watchers - have been dependent on news programs produced in New York City or Philadelphia. The station in New York currently shows the games of the New Jersey Nets and the New Jersey Devils and it will negotiate contracts with other New Jersey sports franchises, Channel 9's general manager, Robert Fennimore, said. It will continue to televise the games of the New York Mets, Knicks, Rangers and Islanders, he added.

The House of Representatives voted today to keep the MX missile alive in the development stage, and then adopted a military appropriation bill for the current fiscal year of $230 billion. The legislation, which now goes to the Senate, was adopted by a vote of 346 to 68. By a voice vote, the lawmakers decided to retain $2.5 billion in the bill for research and development on the MX. On Tuesday, the House dealt the Reagan Administration a major setback by eliminating $988 million earmarked for the production of the first five missiles.

Pierre Gousseland, the French-born chairman of Amax Inc., talked enthusiastically about minerals for an hour and then slumped back into his chair. It had not been an easy year. ''I have watched 25 percent of my staff leave,'' the 61-year-old executive said. ''Many of these people are my friends.'' On Monday, John Towers, the president and chief operating officer, became the latest officer to leave the diversified minerals company, which has been stung by the big decline in commodities prices. Mr. Towers's early retirement at 61 is part of a restructuring plan by Amax that will cut the number of officers by more than 35 percent, to 18, this year, according to Amax. At present there are 20 officers at the company, which has its headquarters in Greenwich, Conn. Dividends Shrink After years of expansion that took Amax into an array of minerals, not all of which were always profitable, the company is closing mines, slashing capital spending this year to $300 million from a high of $1.3 billion in 1980, and searching for measures to stem the company's losses, which are expected to grow to $250 million for the full year. Shareholders have watched their dividends shrink to 20 cents a share from $2.40 in the last year. Nearly 25 percent of the company's 21,000 employees have been laid off permanently.

South African forces attacked the capital of the tiny landlocked country of Lesotho early today, killing at least 30 members of the underground African National Congress, according to an announcement by the Defense Ministry in Pretoria. Lesotho, an independent black state, is entirely surrounded by South Africa, and its capital, Maseru, lies just across the border from white farming areas of the Orange Free State, a South African province. The announcement, attributed to the chief of the defense forces, Gen. Constand Viljoen, acknowledged that five women and two children had been killed in what it described as ''cross-fire'' during the attack. It said four South African troops had been wounded.

Perry D. Odak, the president of the home video game division of Atari Inc., has been relieved of all his duties, the company announced yesterday. The announcement of Mr. Odak's removal capped a day of announcements by Atari and its parent, Warner Communications Inc., which suggested that all was not rosy in the video game business, and which sent the stock of Warner and of other video game companies plummeting. Earlier in the day, Warner Communications said its earnings for 1982 would be well below previous expectations. A major factor in the decline, Warner said, was lower-than-expected earnings in the consumer electronics division, including sales of video game cartridges, which have been strong until now despite the recession.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., disclosed today that three of the five military chiefs had recommended against proceeding now with the muchdisputed plan for closely spaced basing of the MX missile. General Vessey, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that the nation's top military leaders had found the basing proposal ''very difficult to understand and difficult to explain'' and that three wanted to wait until ''technical uncertainties'' were resolved. Senate to Debate MX Today The general's testimony seemed certain to provide ammunition to opponents of the MX, which stands for missile experimental, in the Senate, where the program was scheduled for debate Thursday. On Tuesday, the House voted, 245 to 176, to delete $988 million from the 1983 budget to produce the first five missiles.

The City Council today unanimously approved payment of more than $477,000 in legal fees for Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson and the former Council President, Earl Harris. They were recently acquitted on charges of conspiracy and misconduct in office. The payments were authorized under the terms of an ordinance adopted in April 1981, almost a year before the Mayor and Mr. Harris were indicted by an Essex County grand jury on charges of creating a ''no show'' job for a former Councilman, Michael A. Bontempo. Mr. Bontempo was also indicted, but after the Mayor and Mr. Harris were acquitted, the prosecutor said he would drop charges faced by Mr. Bontempo. Cities and states vary widely in their policies toward assuming the legal costs of defending public officials. Some pay most legal expenses incurred in the course of official duties, while others limit the scope of such payments.

''It was a significant vote, an important vote. But it doesn't mean the MX is dead.

For the first time, scientists have successfully altered the activity of genes in the human body in a research attempt to treat a serious illness. The achievement was described yesterday by scientists for the National Institutes of Health and the University of Illinois College of Medicine in a report in The New England Journal of Medicine. In an editorial, the journal described the work as a ''major new step'' in attempts to treat the serious hereditary blood disorder called thalassemia. The treatment was also said to show promising effects on two sickle cell anemia cases.

At a meeting originally scheduled to deal with an increase in lending power for the International Monetary Fund, the finance ministers of the five major industrial nations will open discussions Thursday on the much broader issue of changes in the world's monetary system. Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan said he had no specific solutions in mind when he called Monday for discussions of monetary changes at the meeting with his counterparts from Britain, France, West Germany and Japan. The one-day meeting will be at the Schloss Hotel Kronberg, on a hilltop northwest of Frankfurt. Mr. Regan said to reporters Monday, ''We are meeting each financial crisis as it occurs, but with no overall symmetry.'' There was a need to look at each country's problems in an ''interconnected fashion,'' he said, adding, ''The situation is getting more serious, and the potential is out there for more problems.''

Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan's proposal this week for a reexamination of the world financial system struck a responsive chord among international financial experts: Even before his suggestion, there had been a growing consensus among economists and private financiers that such changes may be necessary both to spur recovery and to prevent future difficulties. Their concerns include the extreme fluctuations in currency rates, insufficient coordination among the world's bankers and shortcomings in existing international financial institutions. The discussions are centering on such questions as how to modify the floating exchange rate system, how to design a new financial institution to relieve commercial banks of their loans to developing countries and how to bolster existing financial institutions. ''Everybody is very pessimistic now about the world economic outlook because nothing seems to have worked,'' says Rimmer de Vries, a senior vice president at the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company who has long expressed concern about the world financial situation. ''What we are getting now is a cry out of the wilderness that reflects the frustration of knowing that inflation is down, but not knowing where we go from here.''