What was going on when I was born?

The reported downing of a Korean commercial airliner by the Soviet Union has disrupted a modest and tentative mending course in Soviet-American relations. Expressions of public outrage in the United States and Western Europe indicate that the incident has tarred the peaceloving image that Moscow had been working hard to project. Instead, there seems to be a new sense of insecurity about Soviet intentions and unpredictability, although officials here assert that this appears an isolated incident and that there is no evidence of a developing military crisis. The airliner incident could hardly have come at a worse moment for Soviet efforts to generate support for the Western antinuclear movement and the campaign to halt American missile deployments in Western Europe this year. This fact alone makes any Soviet motivation for the incident inexplicable and has contributed to the general atmosphere of unease.

Transcript of Shultz remarks, page 4. WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 - Secretary of State George P. Shultz accused the Soviet Union today of continuing to ''cover up the facts'' of the apparent shooting down of a South Korean airliner. Rejecting the latest Soviet statement on the loss of the Korean Air Lines 747, in which 269 people died, Mr. Shultz said, ''The world is waiting for the Soviet Union to tell the truth.'' In Moscow, the official press agency, Tass, distributed a statement asserting that the Korean Air Lines plane was carrying out a ''preplanned act'' for ''special intelligence aims'' in crossing into Soviet airspace. Tass also said a Soviet plane had fired tracer shells to warn the plane, but did not admit it had shot the plane down.

Members of the United Nations denounced the Soviet Union today for ''murder'' and ''massacre'' as the Security Council began debating the destruction of a South Korean airliner that the United States says was shot down by a Soviet fighter. Canada's delegate, Gerard Pelletier, charged that the shooting down of a ''civilian, unarmed, easily identifiable passenger aircraft by the Soviet Union is nothing short of murder.'' He urged an inquiry by Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar with the International Civil Aviation Organization and called on Moscow to compensate the families of the 269 victims. Outrage Voiced Worldwide The Australian deputy delegate, Louis Lance E. Joseph, described the incident as ''barbarous.'' It was, he said, ''quite simply a massacre in the sky.'' No country, he said, ''can be justified in shooting down an unarmed civilian aircraft serving no military purpose.''

Nine days ago, on a Thursday afternoon, Terence Cardinal Cooke sent for Bishop Joseph T. O'Keefe, the vicar general of the New York Archdiocese. ''I went to see the Cardinal thinking he only wanted to see me about some reassignments for priests,'' Bishop O'Keefe recalled. ''I had all the papers with me. I never expected him to tell me he was dying.''

Heavy fighting erupted today in eastern Chad as 3,000 Libyan-backed insurgents attacked a Government outpost, Chadian officials said. But the Government said its troops repulsed the attackers, inflicting heavy losses. The fighting, for control of the oasis of Oum Chalouba, more than 400 miles northeast of here, marked the first major outbreak of hostilities since French troops began arriving in Chad, a former French colony, on Aug. 11. A French spokesman said no French air or ground forces were involved in the fighting. The nearest French contingent to Oum Chalouba was said to be at Arada, about 60 miles to the south.

The nation's unemployment rate edged up in August by one-tenth of a percentage point, to 9.4 percent, the first upward movement since December, the Labor Department reported today. The increase in the overall unemployment rate was regarded as so small as to be statistically insignificant. It was accompanied by several positive figures, including another strong gain in total employment, and was therefore not regarded as an interruption of the strong improvement in the labor market since early winter. Moreover, the slight August rise in unemployment followed an unexpectedly large decline of half a percentage point in July.

Flights between Taipei and Manila were grounded today in a dispute over the flight on which former Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr. arrived here, where he was assassinated.

A wave of patriotic delirium swept through town this week, and why not? Nicaragua had defeated what it considers its most powerful enemy, the United States, in head-on combat.''We Wipe Out the Yankees!'' screamed a headline in the Sandinista newspaper Barricada. The triumph came at the Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela, where Nicaragua's national baseball team, a scrappy if not exceptionally talented squad, defeated the Americans by a score of 9 to 5 and came home with a silver medal. Cuba won the gold, and the United States had to settle for bronze in the sport it invented. With Nicaragua on a virtual war footing in the face of increasing attacks from insurgents backed by Washington, the David-and-Goliath political symbolism of the upset in Caracas was hard to miss. One newspaper cartoon depicted Cuba and Nicaragua effusively embracing on the victory stand while Uncle Sam flailed helplessly below.

Yasir Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, criticized the United States and other Western countries today for not taking part in the United Nations conference here on Palestinian rights. Mr. Arafat, speaking at the conference, said the nonparticipating countries had refused to ''meet their responsibilities,'' and he asked the 134 nations present to take all the action required to assure Palestinians a ''just peace and the right to live in dignity in their homeland.'' The United States and Israel are boycotting the session on the ground that its sponsors wanted it only as a platform for ''one-sided judgments'' in support of the P.L.O. The major West European powers have sent only observers.

About 200 antinuclear demonstrators were carried off by the police today after they broke through a cordon and tried to hold a sitdown blockade at the United States' Bitburg Air Base. It was the first clash in what some fear will be a ''hot autumn'' of demonstrations against North Atlantic Treaty Organization plans to deploy new nuclear missiles in Europe this winter if arms talks between the Russians and the Americans fail. Parliamentary deputies of the antinuclear Green Party were among those temporarily detained in a two-hour police action to clear the entrance of the camp in southwest Germany.

Pope John Paul II opened the general congregation of the Jesuits here today with a call to the order to leave to laymen those aspects of the world's struggle for justice that promote mainly material well-being.

In his small pastry shop in West Beirut's rocket-scarred Hamra quarter, Mohammed Shomar sold a chocolate pastry called a pyramid to a lone customer today. Then, impulsively, he gave another, free. ''They are delicious,'' he said proudly, then added softly, ''I give you two because tomorrow I may die.'' The mood was bittersweet this morning in Hamra, a once-chic shopping quarter. Some shops and banks reopened and traffic returned to the streets after five days of clashes between Lebanese soldiers and leftist Moslem militiamen that left buildings damaged and the quarter's sidewalks littered with glittering shards of shattered window panes.