If you would like to be the next U.S. ambassador to a pleasant country - say Switzerland, for its skiing, or the Bahamas, for its golf - here's what you should do: Try to develop a close friendship with President Clinton, raise money for his friends, get to know other influential Democrats or build a high-profile political career of your own.

And, history shows there's another way: Open your checkbook. Be forewarned: The price is rising.

Political supporters Clinton picked last year to lead U.S. embassies and missions around the world wrote fatter fund-raising checks than those he chose four years earlier at the outset of his presidency.

The average donations of political nominees jumped 44 percent between the 1992 and the 1996 elections. By comparison, the U.S. inflation rate rose 12 percent during that period.

The explosion in contributions from would-be ambassadors is another example of the 1996 money-in-politics extravaganza that made the election the costliest in U.S. history.

Records show that the 30 political supporters whom Clinton nominated in 1993 gave an average donation of $37,113 for the 1992 election. By contrast, the 30 political choices in 1997 gave an average of $53,552 for the 1996 election.

Since half of the political nominees donated less than $10,000, a handful of generous contributors pushed up the average. They also landed some of the most sought-after posts.

For example, the top giver among last year's ambassadorial selections was Felix Rohatyn, a New York financier now serving as U.S. ambassador to France.

Senate records show that he and his immediate family donated $481,750, almost all of it to Democrats, including Clinton, other candidates and the Democratic National Committee.

The next biggest donors were Kathryn Walt Hall, a Dallas lawyer now serving as U.S. ambassador to Austria, whose family donated $315,107, and James Hormel, a San Francisco philanthropist whose family contributed $209,950. Hormel's nomination for Luxembourg is still pending in the Senate because conservative senators object to his gay rights activism.

The fat cats of 1993 were a bit leaner. Top billing then went to Swanee Grace Hunt, an oil heiress whose family donated $375,100 to Democratic candidates during the 1992 election. She also went to Austria.

Kirk Dornbush, a Georgia investor whose family contributed $178,300, packed his bags for the Netherlands while Edward Elson, a Georgia businessman with donations of $172,664, landed the embassy in Copenhagen.

The practice of rewarding contributors with diplomatic posts is as old as the Republic.

Clinton picked donors and friends for ambassadorships about as often as President George Bush did - 30 percent of the time, according to State Department records.

Bush, who chose six ambassadors in 1989 who each donated at least $100,000 to his presidential election, was himself a political appointee. A former congressman, he also served as ambassador to both the United Nations and China.

"It's a problem, because every president has come into office saying ambassadorships are not for sale. But they are," said Bill Hogan, director of investigative projects at the Center for Public Integrity, a private government watchdog group. "All it does is feed the public cynicism."

There's an unwritten menu of what you can get for a certain amount of money, said Larry Makinson, deputy director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a private group that tracks money in politics. "It's terrible but it's done," he said.

President Richard M. Nixon even put a specific price tag on ambassadorships.

"Anybody who wants to be an ambassador must at least give $250,000," Nixon told White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman in 1971, according to newly transcribed tapes.

"I think any contributor under $100,000 - we shouldn't consider for any kind of thing," Nixon said. "The contributors have got to be, I mean, a big thing and I'm not gonna do it for political friends and all that crap."

Big donors or presidential friends don't go just anywhere. They go to places, such as West European capitals or sunny island nations, that would make great vacations.

In contrast, career diplomats - those specially trained in the U.S. Foreign Service - are dispatched to places with bad climates, remote locales, hazardous politics or dire living conditions. They go, for example, to Angola, Bosnia, Djibouti, Armenia, Swaziland, Cyprus, Peru or Mozambique.

Career U.S. diplomats bemoan the tradition.

"It is an insult to the American Foreign Service," William De Pree, a retired career diplomat, wrote recently in the Foreign Service Journal.

De Pree, former president of the American Foreign Service Association - a group that represents career diplomats, argues there should be a limit on the number of ambassadorships that a president can give to political supporters.

Vice President Al Gore once had the same idea - but that was before he became part of the Clinton-Gore administration. In 1989, when he was a senator, Gore derided then-President Bush's practice of nominating fat-cat donors as "an abuse for which there is no justification."He sought, unsuccessfully, to impose a 15 percent cap on political appointees.

"It is not just a question of the occasional candidate whose credentials are grossly inadequate," Gore argued at the time. "It is our realization that the well-being of our country really does depend more on the astuteness of our diplomats than at any time since the very earliest days of the Republic."

Not all political nominees are big-bucks contributors. But they all share something else: connections.

Last year, Clinton gave the U.S. ambassadorship to Great Britain to his long-time confidant and former White House deputy chief of staff Philip Lader. A former Georgetown University classmate, Christopher Ashby, landed in Uruguay.

Another college classmate, Washington lawyer Gerald McGowan, got Portugal and its completely renovated residence in Lisbon. He donated a rather modest $12,200 during the 1996 election and $76,850 in the 1992 election.

Congress has taken small steps to rein in the practice of rewarding donors with ambassadorships.

In 1973, it began requiring nominees to disclose their political contributions and those of their immediate family to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1980, it passed a law that prohibits presidents from basing their ambassadorial picks solely on political donations.