April 22, 1994

To all appearances, Joseph Jett's life was a Horatio Alger tale for the 1990's. Studious, from a small town in the Midwest and armed only with brains and drive, he pulled himself to the top of Wall Street, commanding a trading desk and earning $9 million in a single year. The fact that this dramatic rise was by an outsider in the clubby world of finance made his story even more of a classic tale of individual triumph. But this week the plot took a nasty twist.

In one of the largest payments ever by a military contractor to settle whistle-blower lawsuits, Teledyne Inc. agreed today to pay $112.5 million to settle two lawsuits by former employees who accused the company of defrauding the Government. Today's settlement is the latest in a series of suits against military contractors brought under the whistle-blower provisions of the Federal False Claims Act, which allows people who come forward with information on procurement fraud to recover 15 to 25 percent of any settlement won by the Government.

WITH the passing years, William Inge gets smaller. One of the three big dramatists of the 1950's, along with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, today he seems a gifted but minor regional playwright. While he wrote evocatively about small-town people, their modest yearnings and the claustrophobia of their landlocked lives -- all of which he had experienced firsthand -- he lacked Mr. Miller's moral strength and Williams's poetic wildness, qualities that might have transported his plays beyond their time and place.

Settlement In A.T.M. Case The biggest regional network of automated teller machines agreed to open its system to rivals, thus avoiding prosecution by the Justice Department on monopoly charges. Page D1. Plotting Welfare's Demise Talk of reforming welfare by getting rid of it is threatening a growing consensus for proposals to make people work for benefits. Page A14. A Trader's Rise and Fall Charges of misdeeds against a top Kidder, Peabody trader are a nasty twist in the plot of an apparent Horatio Alger tale for the 1990's. Page D1. Ads Misled Pregnant Women A judge in San Diego ruled that a center operated by abortion opponents misled women by advertising free tests and counseling. Page A15. Publicity for the Defense As more and more defense lawyers in big trials take their cases to the news media, judges are increasingly moving to silence them. Page B1.

Former President Richard M. Nixon slipped into a deep coma and was near death last night, three days after suffering a devastating stroke, officials at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center said. A two-sentence statement issued by the hospital yesterday afternoon said the 81-year-old Mr. Nixon was resting comfortably, but it provided no other details about his condition or whether he remained in an intensive-care unit. No further statements were issued as of 1 A.M.