Does Bush write his own speeches?

He of course doesn't, which has been one cause of merriment to many. But is he an exception? Well, no: see here and that [sarcasm] bastion of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy [/sarcasm], PBS (part 1, part 2, and part 3.

To cut a long story short: while even George Washington would occasionally invoke the help of Alexander Hamilton when drafting an important speech, Calvin Coolidge was the first president to employ a full-time speechwriter, and every POTUS since then has had an Office of Speechwriting. Even JFK --- a Pulitzer-winning prose author --- relied on them. Ironically, the one POTUS who appears to have needed them the least was Richard Nixon. His erstwhile speechwriter Ray Price relates:

How much of any given speech the president contributes depends entirely on the president, and on the speech. I worked with Nixon; most – my estimate was about 19 out of 20 – of his speeches were not written at all; he’d been a champion debater since high school, and he was more comfortable without a text than with one. Any speech to the nation from the Oval Office, any to a joint session of Congress, was written, as were selected others. His radio addresses were also written; he had much less of a direct hand in those.

When we did do a written speech other than radio it was pretty much a back-and-forth process, usually through about six or seven drafts, with him editing me and me editing him, until we had what he wanted to say in the way he wanted to say it. Somehow, quite by coincidence, every State of the Union [speech] (I did them all) ended up at 14 drafts. [And this was before the days of word processors! -- FB] He often used this writing process, as he did later when writing his various post-presidency books, as a way of refining ideas – if they don’t work on paper, under the discipline of the written word, they probably don’t work, period.

The last statement sounds suspiciously like what I tell my subordinates at work about half-baked technical reports. Of course, the converse of the statement is not necessarily true: there are BS artists who can express themselves just beautifully on paper...