March 2, 1986

JAMES H. McLAUGHLIN sat down at his typewriter four years ago and drafted a ''living will,'' a statement that he did not want his life prolonged by artificial means if there were no hope of recovery. State Senator McLaughlin, who was then 28 years old and a member of the State House of Representatives, said he was working on a living-will measure and decided, based on what he had learned, that ''I didn't want anyone to anguish over me.'' That document had little legal significance at the time. And today, despite Connecticut's new law sanctioning living wills, it still has only limited legal standing. ''It's the weakest of any of the 35 states,'' with similar laws, said Mr. McLaughlin, whose bill was amended significantly before it was passed by the General Assembly last year.

IT took the Filipino people 18 days to shed a President once their rage had been stoked at the ballot boxes. It was a historic wonder to see: shabby knaves who murdered and cheated their countrymen of the precious vote were swept aside by people who rose up in an act of self-determination inspired by the most basic human stuff - weeping, cheering, praying, singing and a sheer yearning for democracy. The crowds found power in their grief for such fresh martyrs as Evelio Javier, a regional Quixote who resisted the roughshod political bosses of Antique province. Javier was blithe, then frightened, in successfully rallying the voters before being chased to his grave by six gunmen. The crowds found resolution in cheering beyond the rigged ballot boxes for Corazon C. Aquino, the most unlikely victor, who transformed a widow's grief into a political force that finally drove out Ferdinand E. Marcos.(Washington's helping hand, page 2.) He limped into exile not in a long-feared national bloodbath, but in what seemed a muddle of puzzlement that this woman in the tiresome yellow dresses could beat the fabled guerrilla fighter at his own game. After frightening salvos of bluster, he left, trailed by his ''Iron Butterfly,'' Imelda, who scattered jewel boxes in the palace while abandoning it, just before a happy mob broke in.

To meet quarterly revenue targets, the Daisy Systems Corporation, a Silicon Valley computer maker, often rushed to ship as many computers as possible at the end of each quarter. Sometimes that meant shipping new products that had not yet been perfected. Other times it meant forgetting to include floppy disks, or other vital parts. Last year the Cross & Trecker Corporation, a machine tool company based in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., recognized that delays in orders might push down its profits in the quarter ending Dec. 31. It took part of its well-funded reserve for bad credit and added it to earnings. Presto, the quarter's income was up from a year earlier.

When President Reagan named a blue-ribbon panel three weeks ago to investigate the space shuttle disaster, many thought its members would simply offer their dignified blessings as space agency engineers tracked down, then fixed, the failed hardware that led to the eerie fireball that consumed the Challenger over Cape Canaveral. Now, hardly anyone can remember a time when it seemed that equipment, and not the agency itself, was at fault for the explosion that claimed seven lives. Like players in a Greek tragedy, a parade of engineers, executives and NASA officials appeared on stage last week in Washington to explain their sometimes terrifying, often conflicting roles in a mission that panel members seem increasingly convinced should never have left the pad. There were tales of miscommunication and mismanagement, of dire warnings that were submerged in the can-do culture of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration bureaucracy and -even more chilling - deliberately squelched in the hours before liftoff. A picture emerged not of an agency whose string of triumphs was marred by a single calamity but of a success-conscious organization pushing on despite disturbing evidence that disaster loomed.

Members of the Presidential commission investigating the space shuttle explosion say the exact cause is still a mystery despite extensive public hearings this week that focused on space agency procedures and the debilitating effects of ice and cold on the Challenger and its twin booster rockets. The chief suspect so far, the panel members say, is the failure of a seal between segments of the shuttle's right-hand booster rocket, which could have allowed flames to escape, touching off the explosion that killed all seven crew members. The mystery is why the seal may have failed catastrophically after 24 successful shuttle flights. Although the cold weather has been clearly implicated, the panel members say, it might not be enough to explain the Jan. 28 disaster.

CONFLICTS AND CONTRADICTIONS By Meron Benvenisti. 210 pp. New York: Villard Books. $15.95. IN A. B. Yehoshua's novella ''Facing the Forests'' (published in Israel in 1963), a young Israeli watchman, a forest scout, is haunted by the remains of an Arab village that was bulldozed to make way for a newly planted forest of slender pine trees. The watchman shares the solitude of the forest with an old Arab who cannot speak and an Arab child. The solitude is interrupted every now and then by groups of hikers who come to admire the work of the Afforestation Department. One such group of hikers turned up with a map and inquired as to the whereabouts of an Arab village. ''A village?'' the watchman asked. He knew of no such village: ''The map must be wrong, the surveyor's hand must have shaken.'' But the old Arab, in excited gestures, ''pointing fervently, hopelessly, at the forest,'' confirms that a village once stood there. The young watchman now wants the forest to burn down. Eventually, on the last night of his assignment, he looks away as the old Arab burns down the forest in a ''riot of horror and glee.'' And out of the smoke and haze, the ruined village appears before his eyes ''in its basic outlines as an abstract drawing, as all things past and buried.''

Boyish and jaunty, he looks more like a graduate student than a theatrical luminary; old black jeans, battered Topsiders and a sweatshirt have been his customary attire of late, hardly a get-up to recall John Barrymore or Laurence Olivier in a regal role. On closer inspection, however, the sweatshirt is arresting. ''Property of Wittenberg University Philosophy Department'' it reads on the front. When Kevin Kline turns around, centered in the middle of his back is a small, discreet logo: the symbol of infinity, with only one word, ''Hamlet,'' floating below it. The sweatshirt was a recent gift from his Horatio, Richard Frank, for at the age of 38 Mr. Kline - an actor whose credits range from Shakespeare to Shaw to Hollywood - has finally taken on the role that has haunted him for years, and that he has always known he would eventually play. It is a formidable prospect for any actor: the most analyzed role ever written in history's most famous play, the character interpreted by the greatest classical actors and literary thinkers of the last four centuries -Hamlet, whose complexity has awed them all.

A barn dating from the 1850's, part of what was once the Stults Farm, has been sacrificed for six three-story town houses in the heart of downtown Princeton, N.J. The town houses, called Victoria Row, were designed in the community's prevailing Queen Anne style. They are on Humbert Street between Wiggins Street and Vandeventer Avenue.

Four months after a Soviet seaman jumped into the Mississippi River and said he wanted to defect, only to be sent home after apparently changing his mind, 60 senators want to reopen the case amid allegations that Soviet officials switched seamen. Members of Congress and others are saying the man who jumped overboard near New Orleans on Oct. 24 may not have been the man who later told American officials he wanted to return to the Soviet Union. State Department officials say they are certain there was no switch. And Boris Malakhov, a spokesman for the Soviet Embassy in Washington, said, ''It's crazy to think it was not Miroslav Medved who was interviewed.'' But several pieces of evidence support the possibility of a switch, at least raising questions about the case of Mr. Medved, whose attempted defection touched off a weekend crisis in Soviet-American relations two weeks before the Geneva summit.

The Kenwood USA Corporation, a manufacturer of video and audio components, plans to build a distribution and sales office in the International Trade Center, a duty-free trade zone in Mount Olive, N.J. Kenwood, which has its international headquarters in Tokyo, will be importing finished products - with deferred import taxes - for redistribution to markets in the United States and elsewhere in North America. The company plans to construct a 120,000-square-foot facility which will include executive offices for its eastern sales headquarters.

Dale Berra and Rod Scurry, two of the three Yankees disciplined by Commissioner Peter Ueberroth for their use of cocaine, readily accepted the penalties today, with Scurry calling the action ''a great day for baseball.'' Al Holland, the third member of the Yankees involved, continued to decline comment on the penalty Ueberroth levied against him. In the aftermath of the action the commissioner took against 21 players Friday, Don Baylor, the American League player representative, said Ueberroth had established guidelines for players to follow that some may view as severe. But Baylor said he thinks they are less severe than they could have been.

For basketball fans, a 37-story, 224-unit condominium tower rising next to Lincoln Center almost certainly will hold bittersweet memories of another tower. The building, called the Alfred, is on the site of the former Power Memorial Academy, a Roman Catholic high school that was home in the 1960's to the towering Lewis Alcindor, the quiet 7-foot-1 basketball star now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Carol Management Corporation is the developer of the Alfred, which will have two penthouses, 24 studios, 131 one-bedroom, 50 two-bedroom and 17 three-bedroom apartments. It bought the land from the Congregation of Christian Brothers, which owned and operated the all-male school. The building had stood for about 90 years, opening in 1893 as a maternity hospital.