He Could Not Stop for Death

Once, when he was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. flew an airplane from Boston to New Haven, Conn., at night after a total of an hour and a half of flight training. Buckley also smoked, drank, ate peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches and took pills by the fistful. He was a reckless sailor who crossed three oceans--his terrified crews nicknamed him Captain Crunch. He abominated seat belts, and in his later life he developed the unnerving habit of urinating out the open doors of cars going at full speed. Buckley, an icon of the modern conservative movement, died last year at 82 from...