Did Billie Sol give the senator $50,000?

Did a swashbuckling swindler slip a certain Texas senator a big wad of cash on Nov. 6, 1960? Four years later, that was the $50,000 question that threatened to sink Ralph Yarborough’s reelection campaign. The swindler was, of course, the infamous Billie Sol Estes, whose specialty was suckering banks into loaning him millions on nonexistent tanks of chemical fertilizer. When his house-of-cards…