What was going on when I was born?

Two confidential documents, one of them describing Navy contingency plans for Middle East hostilities, were found in the home of California man accused of participating in a Soviet spy ring, the authorities said today. They said the other document gave directions for the handling of secret Navy messages at the Alameda Naval Air Station, the California base where the suspect once served as a communications officer. The Federal Bureau of Investigation made the assertions at a bail hearing in San Francisco for the suspect, Jerry A. Whitworth, a 45-year-old retired Navy radioman. It was not immediately clear what kind of contingency plans the document described.

The Labor Department today provided its first detailed look at how far the nation's economy has shifted away from manufacturing jobs since the recession. The study, by the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed what experts described as a restructuring of the job market. Since January 1980, the report said, 2.3 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared. In the same period, the department has said, jobs that supply services rather than products have boomed. The study was requested by members of Congress concerned about a lack of data on the cost in manufacturing jobs from the shift toward services. a shift that private experts have documented since the economic recovery.

The Senate today approved an amendment that would bar the use of Federal funds for activities against the Nicaraguan Government that violate international law or the Charter of the Organization of American States. But in a last-minute compromise, a phrase was added permitting such activities if they are specifically authorized by American law. The amendment was added by voice vote to a bill detailing State Department programs for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. Final action on the State Department legislation was put off until next week.

In mid-1981, at the end of the last severe water shortage in New Jersey, state officials said they had a plan in place to prevent similar crises through the next century. The strategy called for completing three major pipeline projects by this year to bring new supplies to northeastern New Jersey areas with reservoirs prone to shortages. Money for the work was to come from a $350 million bond issue overwhelmingly approved by voters in November 1981. But not much has gone according to script. Two of the pipeline projects have been scrapped and the third is only partly finished. In addition, only a fraction of the bonds - $38.8 million worth - have been sold.

The son of Josef Mengele, the long-sought Auschwitz death camp doctor, apparently visited the man whose body was exhumed here Thursday, the Brazilian police said today. The police have said the body may be Dr. Mengele's. The federal police chief here, Romeu Tuma, told reporters that a photograph of Dr. Mengele's son, Rolf, had been found in the home of an Austrian couple. The couple have told the police that they sheltered Dr. Mengele in the 1970's and that he drowned in 1979 and was buried under a different name.

Administration officials say they believe President Reagan will decide in favor of continued overall adherence to strategic arms control treaties, but will also agree to limited and measured deviations in response to purported Soviet violations of the pacts. Officials describe this as a policy of ''proportionate responses'' which they pointed out is the exact phrase used in a resolution the Senate passed overwhelmingly on Thursday calling for adherence to the arms pacts until the end of 1986. The arms control agreements in question are the antiballistic missile treaty of 1972, which is in full force, and the signed but unratified second strategic arms limitation treaty of 1979, which both the Soviet Union and the United States have informally agreed not to undercut. Although Mr. Reagan's course of action seemed all but certain to the officials, they cautioned that he was not expected to make his final decision until the weekend at Camp David.

A Federal appeals court today blocked the re-opening of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island next week and agreed to hear arguments on whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acted improperly when it voted to let operations here resume. The reactor, Unit 1, has been shut for more than six years, since the accident in March 1979 that crippled the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island. Although undamaged in the accident, Unit 1 was closed for refueling at that time and was kept closed by order of the nuclear commission and later by mechanical problems. It has been shut down longer than any other commercial reactor.

Though this is the off-season for tourism in the Caribbean, several scheduled flights and more than a dozen charters are arriving in Cuba every week with vacationers from Canada, Mexico and Western Europe. Eight new resort hotels are being built, Government officials say, and a West German company has contracted to open a Club Mediterranee-style vacation village. Construction crews that helped build the airport in Grenada that caused the Reagan Administration so much concern are at work on a new international airport at Varadero Beach, about 75 miles east of Havana. Four years ago, Cuba was a virtually closed country, visited mainly by political supporters from other Communist countries and by Cubans from Miami who have relatives here.

One of three Polish dissidents on trial charged with fomenting unrest was ousted from a Gdansk courtroom today for the sixth time in the last five days. The incident began when the court played what was said to be a surreptitiously made tape recording of a conversation last Jan. 25 that the Polish police had with one of the other defendants, Bogdan Lis. At one point another defendant, Adam Michnik, who, with Mr. Lis and Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, stands accused of plotting an aborted 15-minute general strike, leaned forward to hear the tape better. The gesture drew a warning from the judge, Krzysztof Zieniuk. When the tape had ended, Mr. Michnik, a 38-year-old historian, said the judge's remarks were ''motivated by personal animosity.''

Mehmet Ali Agca, asserting that he felt threatened by the secret services of Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, told a court here today that he would not answer specific questions about purported Bulgarian involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Pope John Paul II. But Mr. Agca, who shot and wounded the Pope in 1981, confirmed extensive testimony he has given to Italian investigating magistrates over the last three years to the effect that the Bulgarian state security service, prompted by the Soviet Union, commissioned and financed the attempt to kill the Polish-born Pope. The court fell into turmoil today when Mr. Agca, questioned by Chief Judge Severino Santiapichi about his activities in Bulgaria in the summer of 1980, replied: ''I am not able to answer. I have this concern about the Soviet and Bulgarian secret services. I have received threats.''

Pope John Paul II will visit Australia next year, Deputy Prime Minister Lionel Bowen of Australia said today. He said the Pope had accepted an invitation from Prime Minister Bob Hawke and the country's Roman Catholic bishops to visit in November 1986.

President Daniel Ortega Saavedra has condemned the Senate vote to authorize $38 million in nonmilitary aid to anti-Government rebels as ''a vote in favor of crimes against the Nicaraguan people.'' ''There should be no illusions that this course can cause the Sandinista revolution to sink,'' he said here Thursday night. Mr. Ortega made the remarks as he toured a Managua neighborhood with the visiting Canadian Minister of External Affairs, Monique Vezina. Earlier, Mrs. Vezina had signed an agreement to provide Nicaragua with nearly $11 million in aid to develop its geothermic power resources.