It's a slight exaggeration, but only slight, to say that the latest overhaul of the nation's messy and inefficient tax code came about in 1986 because one man was so obsessed that he wouldn't stop pushing until it was done.

That man was Bill Bradley, basketball star, Rhodes scholar and U.S. senator from New Jersey. He was, by his own description, a "zealot" about revamping the tax code. "All I did for four years was talk about it," he says. Mr. Bradley recalls the time when an interview he had taped popped...