The

By Hugh Sidey

Some days recently the real President (named Bush) has been crowded out of the news by the antics of the has-beens. Ronald Reagan was on display in Japan for a reported $2 million (or 284 million yen) from the Fujisankei Communications Group. Jimmy Carter was in Nashville instructing listeners on how he wrote his books. Richard Nixon huffed off yet again to China after disconnecting his AT&T phone service because the company was sponsoring the TV version of The Final Days, last weekend's account of the end of Watergate and Nixon's presidency. Gerald Ford was at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, of all places, addressing a conference called "Farewell to the Chief," a discussion of life after the White House. Expenses paid, of course.

No answers could be found there on just what to do with these famous fellows. Keynoter Daniel Boorstin, former Librarian of Congress, suggested creating "a House of Experience," like the British House of Lords, where retired, talented Americans could offer their wisdom. Public television's pragmatic Roger Mudd pointed out that the last thing a new President would welcome would be an official pulpit for the guy he just ran out of office.

And while there was massed clucking over the size of Reagan's fee and Ford's continued service on corporate boards, the Communist world was declaring the profit motive holy writ. Not let a retired President participate in capitalism and make a noble buck? That would be a sort of excommunication from America.

With the nonsmoking, jogging, superenergized Presidents we get now, the nation could soon have six or seven healthy retired Chiefs roaming loose looking for things to improve. The consensus for the moment seems to be, as Mudd suggested, not to use them officially but to encourage them to follow their own interests, one hopes with taste and grace. We probably could not change them if we wanted to. It is worth noting that each of the four former Presidents has reverted to form with a vengeance. Reagan is back on the mashed-potato circuit (raised to a world-class level), taking fat fees for propounding his doctrine of hope and reward. Carter, who always was a better missionary than a President, now has the stature and the means to tread the globe's troubled pathways relentlessly urging reform and righteousness.

Nixon is the most scrupulous in money matters. He will not take fees for speaking, will not serve on corporate boards, dropped his $3 million-a-year Secret Service detail. His passion remains power and influence. Nancy Reagan's memoirs report that Nixon called the White House in 1987 and offered his services to urge the hapless Don Regan to quit as chief of staff.

Ford goes about doing good while doing well. He plays golf all over the world for fun and charity, reminds everybody he was an Eagle Scout and still lives by the code, practices old-fashioned partisan politics in election season and openly relishes the money from the boardroom.

True, Truman and Ike had other ideas about life after life in the White House. But that age is probably gone forever, like it or not.