(FORTUNE Magazine) – The reader will now be subjected to musings that originated while a fellow was watching the Nixon funeral service and observing that the crowd included ex- Veep Spiro T. Agnew, Bill and Hillary, and House Speaker Tom Foley. First, here is the worst way to do it: A politician gets a government contract for a friend, and soon thereafter the pal is reciprocating with a cash-stuffed envelope. Crude, eh? And dangerous -- as Spiro discovered in 1973 after actually receiving the loot in his White House office. The danger is that when it all comes out, one will have to plead nolo as it is so difficult to put an innocent construction on the envelope. Far superior from the point of view of both pol and pal is the payment that is unaccompanied by explicit quid pro quos and furthermore is merely probabilistic. Its size is the ''expected return'' on a sweet deal that the pal enables the pol to get in on, this return consisting of the hoped-for profit multiplied by the percentage probability of actually realizing it, and when the story gets out, House Speaker Foley (whose friend put him into initial public offerings) and First Femme Hillary (cattle futures) can argue that they had money at risk, and not one voter in 100 will think to retort that positive expected returns have existential values no less than frogskins in envelopes. By an astounding coincidence, the value worked out to about $100,000 for both Tom and Hillary. To be sure, this was considerably less than the $333,979 walked away with some 15 years ago by GOP Representative George V. Hansen of Idaho as a result of silver futures contracts and other deals he got into mostly via Nelson Bunker Hunt. Had George reported it on his tax returns, he might still be in Congress. The feminist movement has created an exculpatory story line for income- maximizing politicians and their wives. Remember Marion Javits? The wife of Senator Jack Javits of New York, she was receiving $67,500 for PR work performed for the Iranian government (under the Shah) while Jack was a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and she bitterly complained that numerous folks who calumniated this arrangement were really registering opposition to women having their own careers. Marion's defense ultimately did not fly, but a variant of it surfaced in 1984, when the real estate-agent wife of liberal Republican Mark Hatfield of Oregon got a $40,000 fee from a Greek businessman seeking U.S. support for his trans-African pipeline while also buying a $500,000 apartment in the District of Columbia. Normally, of course, the seller pays the commission, but Mrs. Hatfield went on and on about how hard she had worked on the deal. She ultimately had to return the 40 thou anyway, but Oregon Senators' wives continue to make news. You have possibly noticed that a subsidiary theme in groper Bob Packwood's ongoing drama was the entry in his diary indicating that he had approached a lobbyist with the thought that it would be nice if this person had it in his heart to create employment for Mrs. Packwood. Bob himself has been in no position to attribute the controversy over the ensuing job offer to sexism, but that word turned up again in the recent row over the career of Mrs. Ron Dellums. Ron, the radical Congressperson from Oakland, has recently been in the news as one of the Black Caucus members sticking it to Clinton for not instantly bringing democracy to Haiti. He has also made headlines in the Oakland Tribune because of the law firm that represented three highly repressive African regimes -- Nigeria, Gabon, and Cameroon -- and decided that it would be a neat idea to hire Leola Dellums as a $200-an-hour lobbyist after Ron became chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The Tribune quotes Ron as asserting that human rights activists who have linked his elevation to Leola's business success are making a ''profoundly sexist assertion.'' Possibly you are wondering what is the best way to lateral-pass money to a politician. The vote here is for the procedures invoked by Governor Edwin Edwards of Louisiana, a rapscallion of the old school who got into office only because the alternative was David Duke and who has recently been reporting sizable income from gambling (over $300,000 in 1993) on his federal tax returns. Some of the income is clearly related to one or more big dice wins in Las Vegas, which happened to come at a time when Edwards was promoting casinos for New Orleans, and some appears to be related to high-stakes poker games held regularly in the governor's mansion. There is, of course, no way for your servant or anybody else to disprove the null hypothesis: that Edwards is a shrewd gambler who has been winning fair and square. Agnew must be kicking himself for not having thought of it.