DURING AN INTERVIEW in his 34th-floor Fox Plaza office above Avenue of the Stars, Reagan is asked to evaluate his busy new way of life. “ Well, “ he says, “you just have to call it a change. It hardly can be called retirement.” It was all he could do, Reagan says, to prevail upon aides recently to free his schedule for “a few days at the ranch” on horseback each month.

Reagan circled Washington’s monuments aboard Marine Corps One for the last time on Jan. 20, 1989. Only three weeks later, while a friend, Holmby Hills venture capitalist Charles Z. Wick, was negotiating the $2-million deal with Fujisankei, the fledgling former President was addressing Coca-Cola and McDonald’s executives at conventions in Laguna Niguel.

Reagan’s embrace of business is entirely consistent with his role as a traveling spokesman for General Electric before he entered politics and with his Administration’s free-market philosophy. Moreover, most of his schedule is devoted to more traditional ex-presidential pursuits: the memoirs, the library, raising money for his political party. He has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and inducted into the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.

With all this, the man seems to be doing a marathon champion’s job of carbo-loading on mashed potatoes. One February itinerary for the Reagans, like most of the former President’s frequent trips, combined paid “private business group” events with freely disclosed charity or campus functions and Republican fund-raisers.

MARCH 4, 1990 - - Ronald and Nancy Reagan are collecting $131,623 in annual income from his pensions ($99,500 from the presidency, $32,123 from California) and at least $300,000 from other assets that were worth $4 million, at a minimum, before the tour of Japan. He receives handsome government-paid office space and $150,000 a year in federally funded staff assistance. Nancy has made a few speeches at $30,000 apiece to non-charity groups, and the Reagans received a reported $7 million in publishers’ advances on three books: her critically blasted but best-selling “My Turn”; his “Speaking My Mind,”

The Obamas outdid the Clintons, and they are doing it without either of them holding public office, the way Hillary Clinton did.