"We did more base broadening under Ronald Reagan than we did under any other president in the history of the tax code," Steuerle, now a fellow at the non-partisan, Washington-based Urban Institute, said in a phone interview.

Reagan's 1981 tax cut reduced the top individual tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent.

Reagan took back more than one-quarter of the 1981 tax cut by signing off on tax-code changes in 1982 and 1984 that raised revenue largely by eliminating tax breaks, according to data compiled by Bartlett. The 1982 measure, which increased taxes by $57.3 billion, was probably the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history, he said.

Reagan's willingness to raise taxes stemmed from his administration's concern about the federal budget deficit, said Thorndike, a visiting scholar in history at the University of Virginia and a columnist for Tax Notes, a trade publication from the non-partisan Tax Analysts.

'Saw the Necessity'

"His heart was clearly with the lower rates, but he and his administration saw the necessity of raising enough revenue to not run huge deficits," Thorndike said.

Reagan in 1983 enacted an increase in the payroll tax that funds Social Security, and he endorsed requiring higher-income recipients to pay taxes on their benefits.

He presided over the landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986, which further knocked down top individual tax rates, to 28 percent. That reduction was achieved largely by curbing and eliminating business tax breaks and by raising the rate for capital gains.

There were limits to Reagan's appetite for lower rates, something President Barack Obama noted in a fundraising speech on Oct. 4. In making his call for tax increases for high earners, Obama quoted Reagan criticizing tax breaks that "made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary, and that's crazy."

"Reagan, if anything, is more aroused by issues of tax equity than he is by rate reduction," historian W. Elliott Brownlee, co-editor of The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies, said in a phone interview.