March 21, 1984

The Justice Department reached agreement with two major steel companies today on ways to make their proposed merger meet antitrust objections, according to an Administration source familiar with the negotiations. The source, who asked not to be identified, said the department is expected to make the announcement Wednesday. Virtually all issues holding up the merger of the LTV Corporation and the Republic Steel Corporation have been resolved, he added, and any remaining issues are to be settled at Wednesday's session. The Justice Department declined to comment after a day of what appeared to be seesaw negotiations.

Picture captions in some editions of Business Day yesterday, with an article in the Business People column about the General Electric Credit Corporation, were reversed. Gary C. Wendt appeared at the left and Robert C. Wright at the right.

A special grand jury in Queens reported yesterday that it had uncovered ''shocking procedural abuses'' in the way a Forest Hills hospital kept secret its withholding of emergency resuscitation from terminally ill patients whose hearts or breathing failed. The grand jury said the hospital, identified by state prosecutors as La Guardia Hospital, had tried to escape legal consequences of withholding the emergency measures by making sure there would be no record of ''do not resuscitate'' orders. The grand jury said such orders were signified by a purple decal attached to a patient's nursing record and discarded along with the nursing record when a patient died. Charles G. Moerdler, a lawyer for La Guardia Hospital, called the charges in the report ''the height of irresponsibility'' and denied that the hospital had any ''do not resuscitate'' policies. ''There were no purple dots, either,'' he said.

After two and a half years of studying a question that has weighed on the minds of American Jews for four decades, a group of prominent American Jews has concluded that the country's major Jewish organizations did not do all that they could have to save victims of the Holocaust. ''As much as it hurts me to have to say it, we didn't do enough,'' the group's chairman, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, said in an interview. ''Nobody did enough.'' Much of the final report of the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust, an unofficial group of 34 Jewish Americans, is given over to reasons why Jewish leaders did not act more effectively, although they knew by the fall of 1942 that the Nazis were bent on a policy of mass extermination. Last year, 15 months after it was created, the commission broke up temporarily in a clash over the harsh assessment of former Jewish leaders in a preliminary report. The dispute is sure to continue with the publication of the final report, which is to be released early next month.

The Lebanese national unity talks ended in failure today after the country's eight main factional leaders were unable to agree on more than postponing a discussion of their differences into the indefinite future. The talks failed for many reasons, delegates said, but the two they most often cited were the inability of Lebanon's factional leaders to consider serious changes to modernize the political system and the refusal of the Christian leaders to give Lebanon's Moslem majority more political power. ''The failure is perfectly clear,'' a senior Shiite Moslem delegate said. ''You can't get these old feudal lords to absorb new ideas, because they are afraid of change. I think this was their last hurrah. We have an unworkable system, leadership and mentality, but ultimately change will come whether they like it or not.''