SPIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER.

• Author: Kounalakis, Markos

In the early 2000s, as advanced Alzheimer's disease continued to take its toll on Ronald Reagan's cognitive faculties, a dedicated group of conservative ideologues and anti-tax proselytizers were working overtime to define a cohesive narrative of his presidency and establish a permanent anti-tax Reagan legacy in the collective memory.

Chief among those in the anti-tax priesthood was Grover Norquist, who was preparing an effort to use Reagan's eventual death to canonize him as the religion's patron, Saint Ronnie--the perfect conservative who believed all the diehard orthodoxies of the "Americans for Tax Reform"-type Republicans in the Bush era. The goal? Empower the GOP and justify the anti-tax dogma, which was based more on hagiography than history.

It was around this time that, while working on a Smithsonian Institution First Ladies project, I met Nancy Reagan. In passing, she made it clear that her husband's death was imminent. I mentioned this shortly thereafter in one of my regular calls with Paul Glastris, the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, of which I was then publisher. We started musing about how the nation would respond to Reagan's death. Paul thought the magazine needed to prepare. He foresaw a coming tsunami of simplistic, one-sided stories about Reagan and what he meant to America and the conservative movement's future. That gave him an idea: to puncture that narrative by pointing out all the times Reagan broke from Norquist-style conservative dogma, especially by raising taxes. The magazine was going to preemptively pour water on the effort to airbrush Reagan into some utterly pure avatar of doctrinaire conservatism by highlighting the times when he would have made Walter Mondale proud.

We enlisted one of our brilliant young editors, Josh Green, to do the story. At first he was skeptical of the idea--Reagan, a secret liberal?--but he executed it beautifully. "A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today," Josh wrote. "Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control." The list went on. Reagan saved Social Security. He expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit. He responsibly raised taxes three times, despite campaign promises and political pressure. In deed, if not in word, even Reagan...