What was going on when I was born?

The Veterans Administration is threatened by a situation that could overwhelm its ability to provide medical care for the country's 28.5 million former military personnel. In the next few years, most of the 11.5 million veterans of World War II will turn 65 years old. At that age they automatically become eligible for free medical care at V.A. hospitals, no questions asked. Now that the collision between this longstanding demographic trend and the Congressional mandate for expensive care of aged veterans is imminent, the Federal Government has no ready answers for the problems that will arise. For younger veterans, care is usually provided only if their ailments are service-connected or they declare that they are in financial need. But in the case of veterans over 65, a millionaire former officer who never saw a day of combat and who now suffers from an infected hangnail is every bit as entitled to treatment as a former machine-gunner who now makes a living as a truck driver and needs open-heart surgery.

Congress took the first step today toward passing emergency job legislation. The House Appropriations Committee approved a $4.6 billion package aimed at creating jobs and providing humanitarian aid for unemployed workers. The bill, approved by voice vote, is a supplementary appropriation for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. It is scheduled for debate on the House floor next week, and Congressional leaders hope to have it on President Reagan's desk by mid-March.

President Reagan is considering appointing David F. Linowes, a professor at the University of Illinois, to conduct a thorough study of the management problems at the troubled Environmental Protection Agency, a senior White House official disclosed today. The official said Mr. Linowes might head a special committee to recommend changes in the agency's management approach that would bar problems of the kind it is now encountering. The E.P.A. is under investigation by a half-dozen Congressional committees and by the Justice Department because of allegations of mismanagement and suspicions of political influence on its program to clean up toxic waste dumps. New Inquiry Is Sought The chairman of one of those subcommittees said today that he had asked the Justice Department to conduct a criminal investigation of two of its top administrators and a former consultant. In another development today, the Administration handed over four volumes of documents to another subcommittee, as part of the compromise to end charges of contempt of Congress against Anne McGill Burford, the Environmental Protection Administrator.

Six months after it started, Mayor Koch's work camp program for those who commit minor crimes is faltering. Last May, the Mayor said he hoped that up to 9,000 quality-of-life criminals - three-card monte players, small-time marijuana sellers, turnstile jumpers and the like - would be sent to the camps. Between last September, however, when the program began, and the end of January, only 338 such offenders served sentences in a work camp. A new dormitory on Rikers Island that had been set aside for 75 socalled quality-of-life criminals instead now houses 100 regular inmates awaiting trial.

Ninety-nine cent gasoline is back, for the first time in four years. Motorists in parts of the New York area - though not in New York City - and around the nation are buying regular leaded gasoline for less than $1 a gallon, and dealers say they expect prices to continue falling. ''It's a good feeling,'' said Bernard Azrolan, a New York City taxi driverlining up yesterday at the Getty service station in Fort Lee, N.J., less than a mile west of the George Washington Bridge. A big red sign told passing drivers they could buy regular gasoline for 99.9 cents a gallon. That was down almost 14 cents from a year ago, with most of the drop coming in the last few months.

The Government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl accused the Soviet Union today of gross interference in next month's election. ''The Government regards with concern the massive and hitherto unprecedented manner in which the Soviet Union is interfering in the election and the internal politics of the Federal Republic of Germany,'' Jurgen Sudhoff, a Government spokesman, said at a news conference. Mr. Sudhoff referred to an appeal on Feb. 17 by Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko of the Soviet Union for West European nations to disassociate themselves from the American position at the Geneva talks on intermediate-range missiles. He also mentioned a Moscow radio German-language broadcast that predicted social unrest in West Germany if Mr. Kohl's Christian Democrats won the March 6 election.

Consumer prices rose a slight two-tenths of 1 percent in January, as inflation continued to abate. Page 29. By ROBERT A. BENNETT Several of the nation's largest banks reduced their prime lending rates yesterday by half a percentage point, to 10 1/2 percent, the lowest level since November 1978. The reduction followed intense pressure by the Reagan Administration for lower bank interest rates.

Tennessee Williams, whose innovative drama and sense of lyricism were a major force in the postwar American theater, died yesterday at the age of 71. He was found dead about 10:45 A.M. in his suite in the Hotel Elysee on East 54th Street. Officials said that death was due to natural causes, and that he had been under treatment for heart disease. An autopsy is scheduled for today. Author of more than 24 full-length plays, including ''The Glass Menagerie,'' ''A Streetcar Named Desire,'' ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' - the Tennessee Williams was the most important American playwright after Eugene O'Neill. An apprecia-

President Reagan, asserting the United States had been injured in the eyes of its allies, denounced the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today as ''very irresponsible'' in disapproving Kenneth L. Adelman as his nominee for arms control chief. ''I think this is pretty much party-line vote and politics,'' Mr. Reagan said as he vowed to ''do everything I can'' to win approval of the nomination on the Senate floor. The committee voted 9 to 8 against the nomination Thursday, with two Republicans joining in the majority decision to send it on to the full Senate with a recommendation for rejection. 'I'm a Little Annoyed' ''I wouldn't have picked him if I didn't think he was the best man at hand to do the job,'' the President said, fielding questions from a gathering of high school students. ''Frankly I'm a little annoyed at senators who don't give me credit for believing that.''

This seaside industrial city, in the lush Hunter River Valley where vineyards and vegetable farms intermingle with open-pit coal mines, seems on the surface to be typical of the bounteous life in Australia. Lined by sparkling, sandy beaches, Newcastle is the kind of place where factory workers, devoted as are most Australians to the serious pursuit of recreation, take to surfboards at lunchtime to ride a few waves before the afternoon shift. But Newcastle and the entire Hunter Valley, with its population of 450,000, are experiencing hard times. In the past year, coal mining has been slack. The steel industry is threatened with collapse. The state dockyard may well close. An estimated 9,000 jobs have been lost and many residents are wondering, what went wrong?

The infiltration of an unusually large number of insurgents into South-West Africa appears for now to have sidetracked talks between South Africa and Angola on a preliminary cease-fire in the disputed territory. Negotiators for the two Governments held their third round of talks in a little more than two months on the island of Sal in Cape Verde this week, but they reportedly met for only three hours. This was long enough, official sources here indicated, for the South African representatives to make the point that Angola would be responsible for curtailing the military activities of the South-West Africa People's Organization if a cease-fire were to hold.

The Reagan Administration has granted political asylum to a white South African who opposes his country's system of racial separation and service in the military. The 22-month wait by the South African, Dominic Holzhaus, a 24-year-old who works for the Joyce Theater Foundation in New York, ended this month when he received a letter from the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service approving his asylum request for one year. Mr. Holzhaus and his lawyer, Bernard P. Wolfsdorf, a South African who received political asylum here during the Carter Administration, expressed surprise and relief. The two South Africans said this was the first case of asylum granted by the Reagan Administration to a South African.