“What we face…is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”

This wasn’t my line, and it wasn’t Barack Obama’s line. It was Ted Kennedy’s.

The idea for a joint session on health care was hatched about a week before the speech was delivered. It made sense — the President badly needed to rally Congress and the public behind his plan after a month of Tea Party protests and misinformation about what he was proposing.

But I wasn’t too thrilled. Our speechwriting team was supposed to fly to Los Angeles over Labor Day weekend for Ben Rhodes’s wedding, and I figured I’d have to stay behind to work on the speech. The President, being the President, told me I would do no such thing. Finish a draft before Saturday, he said, and he’d do some writing of his own over the weekend.

I was sitting in David Axelrod’s office a few days later, struggling to come up with an ending, when he was handed an envelope from Vicki Kennedy.

Inside was a letter from Ted to Obama, written shortly after he was told that his illness was terminal, that he asked to be delivered to the White House upon his death.

That phrase — “the character of our country” — jumped out at me. I drafted an ending based on the letter that was in the ballpark but not quite there. Then I left for the wedding.

On Labor Day, I woke up in LA to a phone call from Reggie Love at 6am.

“Hey, the boss wants to see you. Could you come upstairs?”

“Reggie, I’m in Los Angeles.”

“So when can you stop by? He has a lot of edits and really wants to see you soon.”

I changed my flight, ran through the airport, and showed up at the White House that night sweaty and out of breath, wearing jeans and a t-shirt but no badge. The officers looked at me strangely and asked who I was there to see. “The President,” I said, and I think they actually laughed.

President Barack Obama and Jon Favreau, head speechwriter, edit a speech on health care in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

I stepped into the Oval and received a completely fair assessment from Obama: “You’ve looked better. Have you showered today?” He smiled and told me he’d made a few changes to the end. Black pen covered the entire page, captured for posterity in one of my favorite Pete Souza photographs.

The President had also zeroed in on Kennedy’s “character of our country” phrase, and wrote a beautiful ending about how that character has always included a large-heartedness that was more than a partisan feeling: “our ability to stand in other people’s shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand.”

As I made his edits that night, I had no idea if health care reform would ever pass. But Kennedy’s letter, and Obama’s ending, have often reminded me that the struggle to build a country true to its founding character is hard, unending, and always worthwhile.

Read the full remarks.