But Reagan didn't need a speechwriter. He was a good one himself.
The life of a presidential speechwriter is not an easy one; take it from someone who knows.
Anthropologist Edward Smith recalls that when he worked as a White House speechwriter, there was a rule against wearing the White House tag after work.
So next time you have to prepare a speech or presentation, try applying one or more of these techniques and see if you have what it takes to be a winning speechwriter.
Every great speechwriter knows this.
And Mr Pink, once Al Gore's chief speechwriter and now a prolific management writer, is a highly motivated self-publicist.
And it is true that the book's author, a former speechwriter called Matt Latimer, writes well and is sometimes amusing too.
Yet she got on well with her vegan speechwriter, Matt Scully, whom she describes as “a gentle, green soul who I think would throw himself in the path of a semitruck to save a squirrel.”
The process of writing and rewriting a State of the Union speech can take months. Ray Price recalled his experience as a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon.
Educated in the United States, the son of a CCM power broker, he recently quit his job as a speechwriter for Tanzania's President, Jakaya Kikwete, to run in Bumbuli.
That pledge was the centerpiece of Bush's acceptance address, written by speechwriter Peggy Noonan, for his party's nomination at the 1988 Republican National Convention.
Pat Buchanan, a speechwriter who considered himself Nixon's conservative conscience, was morose.
In the 1990s Mr Ryan was a speechwriter for Jack Kemp, the effervescent Congressman who, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, made supply-side economics a centrepiece of Republican electoral ambitions.
Mr Brown's own speechwriter is said to be 29。
