Questions in Technicolor

It sounded like a supermarket sweepstakes, the jackpot being $20,000 a year, $260 a month toward the rent and use of a credit card. But California's Republican Senator George Murphy did not have to fill in a lucky coupon, much less tell why he liked a detergent. Technicolor, Inc., his old employer, was content merely that he serve as its public relations consultant after he went to the Senate five years ago.

Unethical? Apparently not. Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Senate's Select Committee on Standards and Conduct, gave Murphy's arrangement his approval without even referring the matter to the members. Many men in Congress, after all, have outside sources of income, particularly from the practice of law. Still, few have such a direct connection, and probably no other legislator is the employee of a company whose chairman, like Technicolor's Patrick Frawley Jr., is a militant advocate of right-wing causes.

Question: What would Stennis, a conservative from Mississippi, have said if Murphy's boss were the N.A.A.C.P.? Or the Black Panthers? Second question: What exactly does the Senator do as a public relations consultant?

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