Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas, which distributes annual awards to outstanding scholars in those fields.
[5] In March 2022, the O’Donnell Foundation made a $100 million gift to UT Southwestern Medical Center to endow a new school of public health.
His responsibility was to recruit party workers to get out the vote for Nixon-Lodge and John Tower for the U.S. Senate, with whom O'Donnell was politically close.
[17][18] In 1963, prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as the state party chairman O'Donnell tried to convince the Republican National Committee to host the 1964 convention in Dallas, but received little support in his endeavor.
[20] After his nomination on July 15, 1964, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, California, Goldwater, in Crichton's words, "with boundless energy campaigned vigorously selling his belief in less government control, supported private enterprise, and increasing capital investment, [and] halting the drift toward socialism and increasing our national debt.
Another Texan, Albert Bel Fay of Houston, was a member of the credentials committee in 1964 and was thereafter the Texas Republican national committeeman.
In 1964, O'Donnell supported George H. W. Bush of Houston in his losing race for the U. S. Senate, first in the primary against Jack Cox, the 1962 Republican gubernatorial nominee, and then in the general election against the Democratic incumbent, Ralph Yarborough.
Albert Fay lost the Republican primary for governor to former Democratic State Senator Henry Grover, also of Houston.
In turn, Grover was defeated in a fairly close vote by the Democrat Dolph Briscoe, but John Tower won a third term in the Senate.
[24] In 1978, he was a key advisor to the narrow election of Bill Clements, the Dallas industrialist who became the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction.
[25] Over the years, O'Donnell has donated to various Republican candidates for office throughout the nation, including $245,000 between 2001 and 2010 to retiring Texas Governor Rick Perry.
[26] In 2011, O'Donnell, who usually kept a low public profile, criticized some of Perry's education proposals as "absurd", including replacing tenured faculty with lower-paid instructors, tying faculty bonuses to student evaluation of instruction, establishing a new accreditation of universities by an agency yet to be created, and the offering of an undergraduate degree that costs no more than $10,000.
[29] In the spring of 1990, Luce was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, won by Clayton W. Williams Jr., of Midland, who then lost the general election to the Democrat Ann W. Richards.