LEGAL TENDER

Sometimes," President Bill Clinton mused on Friday afternoon, "there is a difference between what is legal and what ought to be done." And with that he offered a guided tour of Washington's favorite hideaway--the fertile, foggy valley that lies somewhere between what is wrong and what is illegal. You don't have to be a lawyer to get in, but it helps to think like one.

Hillary Clinton's top aide, Maggie Williams, was spending the day there in March 1995, when California businessman Johnny Chung walked into her White House office one morning and handed her a check for $50,000. It was just "a rather unusual circumstance," Clinton explained last week. She didn't actually ask Chung for the money as the price of admission to sit in on the President's radio address two days later. She wasn't "receiving" contributions on federal property; she was just passing them along. And she certainly didn't "solicit" them, which federal law forbids.

Or does it? Or did she? Chung's lawyer, Brian Sun, told TIME that Chung had approached Williams' aide Evan Ryan the day before, hoping to arrange a cozy lunch in the White House mess for some Chinese businessmen and a later meeting with the First Lady. Somehow the subject turned to Democratic Party needs. Ryan remarked that the President's party had to cover the costs of political events held by the First Lady at the White House, although Ryan "does not recall" that conversation. So Chung came back the next day and handed Williams that "unsolicited" $50,000 check for the Democratic National Committee. According to Sun, Chung did so with the understanding that it would help him gain access for his guests, who indeed dined in the mess and had their pictures taken with Hillary the next day.

But what makes last week's spectacle truly rich is that the President doesn't have to make excuses for Ryan or Williams. And as a lawyer, he doesn't even have to parse the legal delicacies of their actions. Based on what has come out so far, nothing they did that day or the next in the White House appears to have broken the law. What's more, when Vice President Al Gore sat in his office calling up businessmen whose careers and companies depended in part on decisions the White House could make, urging them to support his party's efforts, he wasn't breaking the law either.

The President and his top lieutenants behaved last week as if they were not fully aware of their good fortune. In one press conference after another, they tried to explain that they were proud of what they had done, and now that they had been caught, promised never to do it again. It was as if they had come to believe the headlines that implied someone might soon be going to jail, that Attorney General Janet Reno had no choice but to appoint an independent counsel.