buy him a senate nomination." Cox claimed that all of his contributions had come from
inside Texas.
O'Donnells's Texas Republican organization was overwhelmingly mobilized in favor of
Bush. Bush had the endorsement of the state's leading newspapers. When the runoff
finally came, Bush was the winner with some 62% of the votes cast. Yarborough
commented that Bush "smothered Jack Cox in greenbacks."
Gordon McLendon, true to form, had used his own pre-primary television broadcast to
rehash the Billie Sol Estes charges against Yarborough. Yarborough nevertheless
defeated McLendon in the Democratic senatorial primary with almost 57% of the vote.
Given the lopsided Texas Democratic advantage in registered voters, and given LBJ's
imposing lead over Goldwater at the top of the Democratic ticket, it might have appeared
that Yarborough's victory was now a foregone conclusion. That this was not so was due
to the internal divisions within the Texas Democratic ranks.
First were the Democrats who came out openly for Bush. The vehicle for this defection
was called Conservative Democrats for Bush, chaired by Ed Drake, the former leader of
the state's Democrats for Eisenhower in 1952. Drake was joined by former Governor
Allan Shivers, who had also backed Ike and Dick in 1952 and 1956. Then there was the
"East Texas Democrats for George Bush Committee," chaired by E.B. Germany, the
former state Democratic leader and in 1964 the chairman of the board of Lone Star Steel.
Then there were various forms of covert support for Bush. Millionaire Houston oilman
Lloyd Bentsen, who had been in Congress back in the late 1940's, had been in discussion
as a possible senate candidate. Bush's basic contention was that LBJ had interfered in
Texas politics to tell Bentsen to stay out of the senate race, thus avoiding a more
formidable primary challenge to Yarborough. On April 24 Bush stated that Bentsen was a
"good conservative" who had been kept out of the race by "Yarborough's bleeding heart
act." This and other indications point to a covert political entente between Bush and
Bentsen which re-appeared during the 1988 presidential campaign.
Then there were the forces associated with Governor Big John Connally. Yarborough
later confided that Connally had done everything in his power to wreck his campaign,
subject only to certain restraints imposed by LBJ. Even these limitations did not amount
to real support for Yarborough on the part of LBJ, but were rather attributable to LBJ's
desire to avoid the embarrassment of seeing his native state represented by two
Republican senators during his own tenure in the White House. But Connally still
sabotaged Yarborough as much as LBJ would let him get away with. [fn 24] Bush and
Connally have had a complex relation, with points of convergence and many points of
divergence. Back in 1956, a lobbyist working for Texas oilman Sid Richardson had
threatened to "run [Bush's] ass out of the offshore drilling business" unless Prescott Bush
voted for gas deregulation in the Senate. [fn 25] Connally later became the trustee for
some of Richardson's interests. While visiting Dallas on March 19, Bush issued a
statement saying that he agreed with Connally in his criticisms of attorney Melvin Belli,