What was going on when I was born?

Yuri V. Andropov said today that if negotiations with the United States on medium-range missiles succeeded, the Soviet missiles in Europe that Moscow is offering to eliminate would be, as he put it, ''liquidated.'' Mr. Andropov said the offer to scrap the missiles, including the three-warhead type known as the SS-20, was intended to meet Western allegations that the Kremlin would reduce its medium-range missiles in the European part of the country simply by moving them to the Asian part. The possibility that Soviet missiles in Europe would be moved to Asia has been one of the reasons given by the Reagan Administration for rejecting Soviet proposals in Geneva. Basic Position Is Unchanged But the Soviet leader's offer, which went beyond an ambiguous previous pledge, was coupled to a restatement of the basic Soviet negotiating position, an insistence that the United States abandon plans to start deploying 572 Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in Western Europe in December. (In the United States, a White House spokesman said the Administration wanted to see the full text of the Soviet statement before commenting, but said it appeared ''to be similar to previous statements.''

The following article is based on reporting by Neil Amdur and Frank Litsky and was written by Mr. Amdur. A group of United States athletes competed in the Pan American Games at Caracas, Venezuela, in the last two weeks after most of them had failed drug tests, United States Olympic officials said yesterday. William E. Simon, the president of the United States Olympic Committee, confirmed that the committee had arranged the tests at the request of about 10 of the 600 United States athletes who arrived in Caracas. Some of those asking for the tests, even before the start of the Pan American Games on Aug. 14, were weight lifters. As many as eight of the tests detected traces of anabolic steroids, Mr. Simon said.

The United States Court of Appeals here ruled today that the Department of Housing and Urban Development had failed in its duty to protect children from the poisonous effects of lead- based paint. The court said that under a 1973 law, the agency was required to ''establish procedures to eliminate as far as practicable the hazards of lead-based paint poisoning'' in any property owned or subsidized by the Federal Government. But, it said, the department under four Presidents had failed to do so. Instead, the court said, the department has narrowly construed its obligations according to a cost-benefit analysis for which there was no legal justification.

Terence Cardinal Cooke, the Archbishop of New York, is terminally ill with leukemia and could die within months, the archdiocese announced yesterday. The Cardinal does not plan to resign as the spiritual leader of 1.8 million Roman Catholics in the metropolitan area, a position he has held since 1968, a spokesman for the archdiocese said. The Cardinal is also Military Vicar for Roman Catholics in the nation's armed forces. ''The prognosis is that the disease is terminal,'' the spokesman, the Rev. Peter Finn, said. ''It's severe and it's moving quickly.''

Twenty years ago tomorrow , when a black American courted jail, a beating, or even death if he took the wrong seat, insisted on the vote or marched a public highway for the cause of equal rights, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood up in Washington before 250,000 people, the largest crowd that had ever marched in petition on the nation's capital. ''I have a dream,'' he told them, and then proceeded, in cadences that rolled like waves across the Mall, to describe a future day of harmony, justice and respect. It was not a long speech. It was one of many made that day. But it was the thunderclap, in retrospect - the vision of that enormous crowd, the vision of that dream, brought home to people everywhere what the civil rights movement was all about. It may have been the purest, broadest moment of the movement, and the march, along with Dr. King's articulation of the dignity and aspirations of millions of black Americans, is being marked by an anniversary march in Washington today.

The United States and the Soviet Union have agreed to reopen negotiations on a new cultural and scientific exchange agreement, State Department officials said today. The officials said talks would also be renewed on establishing consulates in New York and Kiev. Both projects had been suspended by the United States in response to the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. U.S. Proposed Talks A State Department official said that the United States proposed earlier in the summer that the talks be restarted, and that the Soviet Union's response was received a few weeks ago. Negotiations on the exchange agreement are expected to begin in about a month, probably in Moscow; talks on the the consulate question are likely to be held in Washington at the same time.

Witnesses at public hearings talked of ghettos and leper colonies. Elderly residents chastised younger ones as disrespectful. Young homeowners spoke of the destruction of a dream. Zoning changes do not come easily to Darien. For more than 50 years, people in this town of 18,673 residents, which has one of the highest per capita incomes in Connecticut, have lived exclusively in single-family homes and fought to keep it that way.

Mexico and bankers signed accords restructuring $11.4 billion of nation's public-sector debt. Page 33. By CLYDE H. FARNSWORTH WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 - Several industrial countries and Saudi Arabia are negotiating an emergency loan of $6 billion for the International Monetary Fund, officials said today. The money would help the lending agency offset a squeeze on its borrowed resources caused by the surge in lending to developing countries that have been hit by the recession.

Jorge Diaz Serrano, who once directed Mexico's national oil company and lived in an elegant, art-filled home overlooking a wooded ravine, is now managing sports at the city's Southern Penitentiary. Mr. Diaz Serrano has been there since July 30, when his colleagues in the Mexican Congress, where he was serving as a Senator, voted unanimously to strip him of his immunity against charges that he was involved in a $34 million fraud. Although Mr. Diaz Serrano's case has yet to come to trial - and probably will not for some time - his public castigation and jailing have been the most visible success in the ''moral renovation'' campaign begun by President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado when he took office in December. Lacking the financial resources that many of his predecessors had to build public works for their constituents, Mr. de la Madrid appears intent on trying to placate the public by dismantling one of the country's most elaborate and irritating structures, its pervasive system of corruption.

For weeks, mothers kept children, and their fears, locked indoors. If a youngster failed to return home on time because he had lingered too long at the parking lot, his makeshift soccer field, a hysterical mother or father would rush to the local police station. No Boston strangler has stalked the streets of Cairo. The police here, unlike Atlanta, have not been frustrated by an agonizing series of child murders.

The chief police investigator assigned to the assassination of Benigno S. Aquino Jr. gave the first detailed account of his inquiry today. He acknowledged, however, that he had no firm answers for nearly every key question in the case. Five days after the slaying of the leading opposition figure, he said, it still was not known who the assassin was, how he had broken through a supposedly tight security net, how he had determined exactly where to position himself and what his motive had been. Again and again, the police official, Maj. Gen. Prospero A. Olivas, prefaced his statements with the disclaimer, ''I am not in a position to say.''

Several hundred people, most of them of Filipino descent, crowded into the Church of the Holy Family last night for a mass and memorial service for Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Speakers at the service, which was sponsored by the Alliance of Concerned Artists for Human Rights, included Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who said, ''I know all too well the terrible pain, the grief and the echoing emptiness that has come over the Aquino family.''