COLUMN ONE : What Role Will Bush Play Now? : The power, the prestige, the demands will end, and what will fill the void remains a mystery. But American history offers him many models, from diplomat to farmer.

It was the boxes that startled Ronald and Nancy Reagan when they stepped into their new home in Bel-Air on Jan. 20, 1989. Boxes in the kitchen. Boxes in the bedroom. Boxes at every turn. So many boxes that a week later private citizen Reagan complained of a sore back from the unaccustomed bending and lifting.

Life in the White House had been nothing like this.

Today George Bush faces a similar return to reality. And the task ahead goes well beyond the abrupt need to do many homely chores for himself: Now he must decide what kind of “former President” he wants to be.

On Thursday morning, when he is no longer the most powerful person in the world, when his pronouncements no longer cause millions to be won or lost on Wall Street, when a simple trip to a restaurant no longer halts traffic along the route, Bush will face the same question that has confronted each of the 31 predecessors who survived this unique occupation: What should I do with the rest of my life?

Like an actor surveying a rack of faded costumes, Bush will begin to choose his own role. While he so far professes uncertainty about what the years ahead will hold, the past--his own and the nation’s--offers some clues.

In almost 200 years since George Washington retired to Mt. Vernon as the nation’s first former President, history has offered various models for the life of an ex-chief executive. Many have simply reigned as dignified if slightly disembodied eminences--gracing the stage but playing no active role. Some created useful but highly personal new careers.

One or two even managed to make what historians judged to be greater contributions after leaving the White House than they had while in it.

George Washington, after he left the presidency, oversaw the rehabilitation of his Virginia plantation, which had sadly deteriorated during his years as President. And he became a surprisingly active voice in a number of national controversies, including the new nation’s difficult relations with France and Britain.

John Quincy Adams, after an ineffectual term in the White House, served nearly 17 years in the House of Representatives. There he played a tireless and significant role in the long struggle over slavery.

Martin Van Buren, who was the most recent President before Bush to win election to the White House directly from the vice presidency, twice sought the presidency after being defeated for reelection in 1840. He failed each time.

Ulysses S. Grant, though his post-Civil War Administration was stained by scandal, remained a widely revered figure for his military leadership. He spent his dying years struggling to complete his memoirs.

Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest man to serve as President, pursued a political course after leaving the White House that was almost as tumultuous as his earlier life. Vice president under William McKinley, T.R. entered the Oval Office when McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and served almost two full terms before retiring in 1909. Disenchanted with his successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912. This was before the constitutional amendment limiting a President to two terms.

When he failed to win the GOP nomination, Teddy Roosevelt organized the Bull Moose party and ran anyway. The result was the election of Woodrow Wilson as 28th President of the United States.

More recent former presidents offer an equally broad range of choices for Bush’s consideration.

Gerald R. Ford joined corporate boards and built a personal fortune while indulging his passion for golf.

Ronald Reagan made several speeches, for huge sums, and then began a full-fledged traditional retirement.

A handful of presidents also got an opportunity in retirement to rebuild damaged reputations.

Jimmy Carter, for instance, left office under a cloud because of the Iran hostage crisis, soaring inflation and a host of other problems. Today, Carter probably still is more respected than loved, but his efforts to help the poor through his work with Habitat for Humanity and to mediate a series of international issues, including the startlingly successful free elections in Marxist Nicaragua, have restored him to a position of honor.

Even more than Carter, Richard M. Nixon has sought redemption in his retirement years. After leaving office under the dark shadow cast by Watergate, he first became something of a recluse, then slowly edged back into public life as an elder statesman and author of books on foreign policy.

Herbert Hoover, who became a reviled symbol of vacillation and ineffectual leadership during the Great Depression, also achieved a measure of redemption in the years after he left the White House. As the years passed and the country recovered, he achieved the kind of elder statesman status traditionally accorded former chief executives.

Since the days when Dwight D. Eisenhower retired to his home in Gettysburg, Pa., 32 years ago to become a gentleman farmer, the nature of presidential retirements has substantially changed. Their staffs have grown, and to varying degrees former presidents have continued to play a role in American society after their days in the Oval Office end.

But what remains unchanged is this: Like a Cinderella at midnight, a President finds that at the moment his successor is inaugurated, all but a few of the vestiges of his special life--and unique authority--disappear, while the demands on his time fall off dramatically.

Suddenly, this man who barely had a moment free, whose every minute was precisely scheduled, has time on his hands. And he must decide for himself how to spend it.

It is, said a former senior White House official, “a very lonely time.”

As soon as private citizen Bush leaves the inaugural stand at the U.S. Capitol, he will hand over to a military officer the pocket-sized card containing the nation’s nuclear war codes that he has carried for 1,461 days.

The next morning, there will be no President’s Daily Briefing, with its up-to-the-minute intelligence reports, waiting for him when he arises. Later, his trip to the office will no longer mean a stroll beside the Rose Garden to reach the Oval Office. Rather, he is more likely to step out his front door and face the daily traffic.

His own pronouncements and speculation from friends offer only clues about how the future will unfold for citizen George Bush.

There is talk of a book, the by-now de rigueur memoir to set out his own account of the White House years. He has said he will take a hand in the establishment of his presidential library at Texas A&M; University. He will almost certainly spend much of the summer at his home in Kennebunkport, Me.

Already, the 41st President of the United States has seen to the most immediate challenge that faces a former President: He has found a place to live. He and his wife, Barbara, have rented a house in Houston while a new home is built on a lot nearby.

He has a place to work: An 11,000-square-foot suite of offices being remodeled for him, his staff, and his Secret Service detail on the top floor of a tony office building a few minutes’ drive from his Tanglewood neighborhood. And he will have a pension of approximately $187,800 a year. That pension, along with investments, could give Bush an annual retirement income of as much as $500,000.

“I am about to get on with the rest of my life,” he told the corps of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in an emotional, symbolic farewell to the nation’s military one recent day.

But what that means in a deeper sense, say friends and aides, is something he has not yet addressed, and something even Bush acknowledges he may not address for some time.

Even Bush’s own past offers no certainties about how he will spend his time.

After a succession of jobs in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he found himself out of work on Jan. 20, 1977. He returned to Houston. He joined the boards of directors of several corporations. He plunged into Republican politics, supporting party members running for Congress, the Senate and governorships. And then, beginning in 1979, he ran for the presidency. But scrap all that as a likely model for George Bush, 1993.

At 68, he is seemingly in good health and full of the energy that he has exhibited throughout his years in public life.

The only limits on him--and they are not minor--are self-imposed: a wariness, his aides and friends say, of taking on any activity that might appear beneath the dignity of the office he has held for four years.

If the President has one goal, said former Rep. Thomas L. Ashley (D-Ohio), a close friend of Bush’s since the two were classmates at Yale, it is to “maintain the dignity of his office and his good name.”

Clearly, the President feels under no pressure to make any decisions.

“He really made it pretty clear,” Ashley said after a recent dinner with Bush, “that he isn’t focusing on it, and doesn’t intend to right away.”

Here is how he described his plans, when a Marine he encountered in Baidoa, Somalia, asked about them on New Year’s Day:

“Well, I climb into Air Force One for my last ride on that majestic airplane. We go back to Houston, Texas, where my wife has already shifted gears dramatically. In fact, she has some plans for a house, which they’ve drawn up behind my back . . . .

“No plans to run for anything except the county line in 1996. Stay out of politics and forget the head table. . . . You see, my problem is I thought I was going to win, so I didn’t do any defense planning, you might say. I must say though that the future on a very personal basis looks very promising.

“We have 12 grandchildren. I am blessed with 12 grandchildren and I have not been too good in that business for the last 12 years because of my responsibilities, but I plan to make up for that now,” he said.

But being out of the action, and out of the limelight, might be difficult for this peripatetic politician who has held high-powered posts of national and international reach for most of the past 2 1/2 decades.

It took but a week or two for him to snap out of the shock of his Election Day loss, which he alone among the upper level of campaign and White House aides could not see coming, and to bounce back into the demands of his job.

An Air Force run-in with two of Saddam Hussein’s jets over southern Iraq brought a 3 a.m. telephone call to the President’s bedside. The prospects for an arms control treaty led him to push negotiators until it was completed. And even as his term reached its final weeks, he charged off to Mogadishu and Baidoa, to Moscow and Paris. He also went hunting.

In the end, it may be these last few days in office that provide the strongest clues to the future of George Bush. Those close to him suggest the post-White House days might be an amalgam of the outdoor activities and sports on which he has thrived since childhood, and the more serious pursuits of his adult life--even if his interest in foreign policy can only be indulged from a distance.

One former aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, looks at the number of “emerging democracies that came about on his watch” and predicts that Bush will “want to do something to further these democracies so they can move from the fledgling stage to the stable stage.”

Bush was said to have had a good laugh with friends at the notion, which circulated shortly after Election Day, that he would become president of Yale University.

“He’ll find things to do between 9 and 5 besides accepting honorary degrees,” predicted Stephen Hess, a student of the presidency at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who 32 years ago was the Eisenhower aide who helped answer the retired President’s mail.

“An ex-President doesn’t have to have a shtick,” Hess said. “He doesn’t seem to be a greedy person. There isn’t much pressure on him to take honorariums from a Japanese corporation,” a reference to a lucrative post-presidential speaking tour Reagan made in Japan.

But, Hess said, Bush will “have to work very hard not to kibitz in foreign policy, because that’s been his thing. I would think he would do a fair amount of travel. I would expect you’ll see him popping up all over the place. It would be too hard for him to sit in Houston all the time.”

But the speculation on the part of aides, friends and outsiders is just that: Speculation. Take it from the man at the center of the speculation.

As his involuntary retirement grew ever closer, Bush told the Marines with whom he visited in Somalia: “I don’t really know what I will be doing.”

Bush’s Approval Ratings Compare Favorably With Predecessor’s

A review of polling by The Times and Gallup shows George Bush’s average job-approval score during the term was 62%, surpassed by only three of his predecessors in modern times.

Bush Reagan Carter Ford Nixon Highest 84% 68% 75% 71% 68% Lowest 33% 45% 21% 37% 24% Last 55% 61% 34% 53% 24% Average 62% 57% 47% 46% 48%

Johnson Kennedy Eisenhower Truman Roosevelt Highest 80% 83% 79% 87% 84% Lowest 35% 57% 49% 23% 54% Last 49% 58% 59% 31% 66% Average 55% 70% 66% 46% 68%

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He Will Leave Office as the Most Popular Living Former President

Buoyed in part by his popular last-minute shots at Saddam Hussein, Bush’s current favorable rating is 68%. That makes Bush far better liked than Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald R. Ford or Richard M. Nixon.

Bush Reagan Carter Ford Nixon Favorable 68% 54% 54% 50% 31% Unfavorable 27% 40% 32% 24% 56% Don’t know 5% 6% 14% 26% 13%

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His Legacy, Above Average to Average

According to polls taken as each man left office, expectations for Bush’s legacy are higher than they were for Carter, but lower than those for Reagan.

Bush Reagan Carter Ford Outstanding 6% 17% 3% 5% Above average 32% 42% 11% 20% Below average 17% 9% 31% 15% Poor 6% 5% 15% 6% Don’t know 1% 2% 3% 4%

Source: Polls by the Los Angeles Times and the Gallup Organization