An e-mailer mentioned Dwight Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe as an excellent book written by a president. I know of it but haven’t read it. I asked for proof that Ike had done the work himself. Here’s the reply:

From Travis Beal Jacobs, “Eisenhower at Columbia”:
“Working sixteen hours a day, he completed the draft of his five hundred-page memoir on March 26 [having started in early February]. Joseph Barnes, the foreign news editor at the Herald Tribune, told Eli Ginzberg that on one occasion Eisenhower dictated, without stopping, five thousand words that required almost no editing, and Barnes had ‘never seen such a performance.’”
Eisenhower wrote MacArthur’s speeches while serving as his deputy. Why shouldn’t he have written his own memoir?

Make of that what you will. As long as we’re in the category of leaders who are “powerful writers,” I may place my bets with the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.