The Long Goodby at the Bush White House : Endings: George and Barbara Bush are packing up the pictures, putting out the dog and turning off the lights. It’s the end of an era in Washington.

And now, it is all ending.

From the north side of George Bush’s White House, the view is of a massive structure being completed on the sidewalk. It is an armored reviewing stand, from which Bill Clinton will watch his inaugural parade ushering in a new era. Republicans think of it otherwise. They call it “The Gallows.”

The President’s diplomatic passport is being invalidated. It carries the green visa of Hungary, which Bush visited in 1989, and the blue, purple, red and black stamps of dozens of other countries to which he has traveled. Typed in capital letters on the inside of the back cover: “The bearer is President of the United States.”

George Herbert Walker Bush will be issued a new passport. The bearer will be identified as a former President.

His mahogany desk, always neat, is now bare, save for a telephone and several folders. Only a few books and historical pictures remain on the cream-white walls of the Oval Office. Staff members were told to clear out their offices; fresh paint must be applied for the new tenants. And by midweek, the moving vans were parked, ready to cart the President’s files and furniture to Texas.

As Wednesday approaches, each day brings another emotional moment--one more “last” this, one more “final” that, one more “Tribute to President George Bush.” The moments are tumbling together, made all the more poignant by the depth of the President’s election loss, the departure from power of a team that held sway for 12 years and the generational shift about to overtake the nation’s capital.

Thursday afternoon, the President and First Lady attended the “Armed Forces Salute to President and Mrs. Bush” at a nearby Army post. In the evening, the Cabinet joined the President for dinner at Blair House.

Old friends are stopping by for one last time: Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney joined the Bushes at Camp David on Saturday for their final weekend there.

And Wednesday, Ronald Reagan came to call. In the White House East Room--where he and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed a treaty eliminating the superpowers’ arsenals of medium-range nuclear weapons, the room where he swore in so many members of his Administration on Jan. 21, 1981, and where, with a lump in his throat, he bade them farewell on Jan. 19, 1989--Reagan became the first living President awarded the Medal of Freedom.

Bush hung the golden star around the neck of the man he called “my friend and mentor . . . a true American hero.” The 41st President of the United States said to the 40th President: “I can’t do this without kissing you.”

There are, of course, jokes.

“Barbara wanted to be here,” Bush said Tuesday, explaining his wife’s absence from a bipartisan tribute marking his support for the Americans With Disabilities Act. “And I wish she were here, because the more she packs boxes over there, the more irritable she gets.”

But throughout it all, there is a feeling of finality. It is all coming to an end.

Here, on Wednesday, were people not likely to be seen in the East Room in the near future, a collection of the famous and the faded. The heroes. The investigated. The pardoned. In short, the panoply of personalities that played on the nation’s political stage for more than a decade--all gathered to salute Reagan when he received the nation’s highest honor but also to salute a period in American history.

James A. Baker III, George P. Shultz, Al Haig--secretaries of state. Baker, Donald T. Regan, Kenneth M. Duberstein--chiefs of staff. Dick Cheney and Cap Weinberger. The Doles, Robert and Elizabeth. Edwin Meese III. Richard G. Darman. John M. Poindexter. Nancy Reagan, in red.

The people who helped Reagan win election were there: Lyn Nofziger. Ed Rollins. Stu Spencer. Michael K. Deaver. Richard Wirthlin. So too were those at Bush’s side at the end: Dan Quayle. Colin L. Powell. Brent Scowcroft. Baker. Barbara Bush, in blue.

As it has so often, it fell to Reagan to bring out a laugh: “This year marks the 200th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of the White House. (Pause.) By the way, my back is still killing me.”

And it fell to Reagan--now barely three weeks short of his 82nd birthday, his voice still deep and mellifluous, if less robust than remembered--to put a sunny face on a somber moment:

“Like a runner nearing the end of his course, I will hand off the baton to all those who share my hopes for the future and my reverence for this blessed country. Some may try and tell us that this is the end of an era, but what they overlook is that in America, every day is a new beginning, and every sunset is merely the latest milestone for a voyage that never ends. For this is the land that has never become, but is always in the act of becoming.”

But that does not mask the reality that something, indeed, is ending.

So, in the wintry damp of a Washington dusk, Bush was seen the other day walking from the Oval Office, beside the bare twigs of the crab apple trees that border the Rose Garden. He was carrying a small cardboard packing box. In it were the family pictures--children, grandchildren and more grandchildren--with which he had covered the polished top of the credenza behind his desk. He was heading home.