Cody Keenan

Keenan was also responsible for much of Obama's speech at the 2009 White House Correspondent's Dinner. When Obama said, "We can't just talk to our friends, we've got to talk to our enemies too and I've begun to do exactly that," a picture of Obama talking to Keenan, dressed as a pirate, flashed on the screen.

As was fitting, Keenan also penned Obama's eulogy for the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). Keenan got his political start working in Kennedy's office in 2003, and later became a staffer on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which Kennedy chaired.

A Chicago native, Keenan joined the Obama team in 2007. By then, Keenan had left Capitol Hill for Harvard's Kennedy school. He asked Stephanie Cutter, his colleague from Kennedy's office who would later become a top Obama campaign aide, about opportunities for summer internships. She suggested Keenan send his resume to the Obama campaign.

Keenan hit it off with Favreau and interned for the speechwriting team during the crucial summer of 2007. "Over the summer, we were still introducing Barack to crowds who didn't know who he was," Keenan told the Kennedy school's student newspaper. "We'd sit down and toss around ideas to see what stuck."

At the end of the summer, Keenan left the campaign to finish his public-policy degree. "I feared it might be the worst decision I ever made," Keenan told his alumni newspaper.

Luckily for him, the campaign was still going strong by the time he graduated in 2008, and Keenan rejoined it. When Obama arrived in the White House, so did he.

In His Own Words

"But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -- at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -- it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds,"

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