”There is no improper relationship.”

Into those five, carefully chosen, classically Clintonesque words– delivered to public television’s Jim Lehrer in an interview on Wednesday–President Clinton inserted two escape hatches. See if you can spot them.

What remains to be seen is whether this Houdini of nondenial-denials can slip through the tightening web of allegations of perjury, suborning perjury and obstruction of justice that have grown out of Paula Jones’s lawsuit charging the President with sexual harassment.

The evidence is not all in, and what’s known so far might not be enough to cripple a politician with Clinton’s survival skills. But this is clearly not just another ”bimbo eruption.” Clinton’s alleged sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, now 24, and his alleged effort to cover it up, have fused the Jones case with the criminal investigation by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr–and conceivably opened a legal avenue to impeachment.

Lewinsky was a starstruck 21-year-old when the President allegedly commenced an intimate physical relationship with her; she was allegedly pressed to deny the relationship both by Clinton and his friend Vernon Jordan; she subsequently denied it in a sworn affidavit prepared by a lawyer recommended by Jordan, who took her to the lawyer’s office in his car; and the allegedly false affidavit was filed Jan. 12 in federal court in an effort to quash a subpoena by Paula Jones’s lawyers.

Clinton was referring to Lewinsky when he said ”there is no improper relationship.”

Escape hatch No. 1: By saying that there ”is”–a word he used three times in the interview–no improper relationship, Clinton avoided saying whether there ever was such a relationship. The use of the present tense was noted by the news media, prompting Clinton to use ”was” in two later interviews.

Escape hatch No 2: In Clintonspeak, a physically intimate relationship with a woman other than his wife is not necessarily ”improper.” In his carefully lawyered, Dec. 17 answer to Paula Jones’s amended sexual harassment complaint, Clinton said through his lawyer, Robert S. Bennett: ”President Clinton denies that he engaged in any improper conduct with respect to plaintiff or any other woman.” (Emphasis added.) But during the 1992 campaign, Clinton intimated that he had been unfaithful to his wife. And when he was questioned under oath for six hours by Jones’s lawyers on Jan. 17, Clinton reportedly admitted for the first time that he had a sexual relationship with Gennifer Flowers– something he specifically denied in 1992. So what’s ”improper”?

Clinton may also be trying to create another escape hatch in the way he defines a ”sexual relationship.” Lewinsky told Linda Tripp–according to a source familiar with the account of Tripp and with the more than 20 hours of conversations with Lewinsky that she secretly recorded–that Clinton had always stopped just short of actual sexual intercourse during their intimate encounters.

According to some accounts of the Tripp tapes, Lewinsky said that Clinton expressly sought oral sex, explaining that it was not technically adultery. Clinton used to make the same point back in Arkansas, according to some of the state troopers who were in his security detail.

This is the same Clinton who was captured by Gennifer Flowers’s tape recorder saying: ”If they ever hit you with it, just say no and go on. There’s nothing they can do.” According to a source familiar with Tripp’s account, Lewinsky told Tripp that Clinton (and Jordan) had said repeatedly that if only two people were in a room and both deny that anything happened, ”they can never prove it.”

But a good cross-examiner can nail down the sorts of nondenial-denials that Clinton can get away with in press interviews. And Starr’s office is laying the groundwork for a climactic cross-examination of Clinton about whether he orchestrated a cover-up of his alleged affair with Lewinsky. Clinton’s still-secret sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case– in which he reportedly contradicted the accounts of other witnesses–will also be scoured for evidence of perjury.

It seems highly likely that his deposition last Saturday and his eventual testimony in Starr’s investigation will show that Clinton has to either risk a perjury charge by making the kind of specific denials that he has so far sought to avoid, or concede he had an intimate physical relationship with Lewinsky. If he does the latter, he will in effect be acknowledging that her affidavit is a lie–which, in turn, could implicate him in a cover-up conspiracy.

If Starr develops evidence that corroborates what Lewinsky told Tripp between October 1996 and last week, then Jordan could be indicted, and charges against Clinton could be referred to the House of Representatives, which has authority to bring articles of impeachment.

That is a big if. Much will depend on whether Lewinsky succumbs to the pressure to cooperate with Starr; on how fully Tripp’s tapes and notes of her conversations with Lewinsky document Tripp’s allegations of an attempted cover-up conspiracy; and on whether the tapes have the ring of truth and match up with other evidence being gathered by Starr, such as Secret Service logs detailing the times of Lewinsky’s visits to the Oval Office.

Starr does appear to have a considerable amount to work with:

* According to the source familiar with Tripp’s account, the tapes she made over a 15-month period are strikingly detailed and vivid. The tapes are punctuated with emotional outbursts by Lewinsky, who is said to describe everything from romantic encounters in the White House to 2 A.M. phone sex sessions with Clinton to heartbroken hysterics as Clinton appeared to be distancing himself from her. Lewinsky is heard raging that ”the creep”–as she repeatedly calls Clinton in later tapes, after dubbing him ”Handsome” in happier days–had broken his promises to bring her back from the Pentagon to the White House. The source said that Lewinsky told Tripp that Clinton and Jordan had made it clear that she should deny her relationship with the President. Seeking to protect herself and Clinton, Lewinsky allegedly pressed Tripp to lie under oath to Jones’s lawyers, and later offered her money to duck her scheduled deposition.

* Tripp has said that Lewinsky had kept and played for her three brief messages left by Clinton on the answering machine in Lewinsky’s apartment at the Watergate.

* Evidence has surfaced that Jordan and another Clinton crony, U.S. representative to the United Nations Bill Richardson, took pains to meet with Lewinsky to try to arrange jobs for her in New York. Jordan’s effort to line up a public relations position for her at Revlon Inc., of which he is a director, was withdrawn after the scandal broke, according to company officials.

* Clinton’s denials have been so circumspect as to suggest he is trying to hide something, and his actions, as depicted in the Tripp tapes, are consistent with his behavior during the Gennifer Flowers episode.

The credibility of both Tripp and Lewinsky–who is under enormous pressure to cooperate with Starr but has apparently not cracked yet–is already under attack by the Clinton camp, amid dark suggestions that there must be something fishy about Tripp’s role because she had also helped expose Clinton’s encounter with another woman, Kathleen Willey.

Ironically, Tripp has said that what motivated her to start surreptitiously taping her telephone conversations with Lewinsky was Bennett’s quote to Newsweek last August that Tripp was ”not worthy of belief” in partially corroborating Willey’s claim that she had been kissed and fondled by Clinton in the study adjoining the Oval Office.

Tripp apparently viewed this as an attack on her integrity by the President himself. Fearing for her job in the Pentagon press office, and anticipating inquiries by Paula Jones’s lawyers into Clinton’s extramarital activities, Tripp viewed the taped calls as a way of protecting herself, according to a source familiar with her account. Later, she came to resent what she saw as Lewinsky’s role in an ”effort to get (her) to lie under oath.” On Jan. 13, a day after taking her evidence to Starr’s office, Tripp arranged to meet Lewinsky at a Pentagon City hotel while carrying a secret listening device supplied by the prosecutors. With numerous FBI agents listening in, the two women spoke for four hours in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton. The Washington Post reported that Lewinsky explicitly discussed how she was coached for her Jan. 7 affidavit and again asked Tripp to testify falsely under oath.

At this point, President Clinton has three possible lines of defense. Lewinsky could stick by her story of Jan. 7, even if it means doing jail time as Susan MacDougal has done. The White House could try to paint her as a delusional personality who made up the whole story. Or she could portray herself that way.

Monica Lewinsky, until recently a lowly intern, is suddenly a very powerful young woman.