Camp David

Camp David is the country retreat of the president of the United States, set in the wooded Catoctin Mountains of Frederick County, Maryland, about 60 miles northwest of Washington. It began as Camp Hi-Catoctin, a cabin camp built in the late 1930s by the Works Progress Administration for federal employees and their families. In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt chose it as a cooler, more secure substitute for the presidential yacht during World War II and named it "Shangri-La," after the hidden mountain kingdom in the novel Lost Horizon. Dwight D. Eisenhower renamed it Camp David in 1953 in honor of his father and his grandson, both named David. Officially it is a military installation, Naval Support Facility Thurmont, staffed by the Navy and Marine Corps.

The retreat has hosted a long list of foreign leaders. Winston Churchill stayed there in May 1943 during wartime planning talks with Roosevelt. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev met Eisenhower there in September 1959, and the friendlier tone of those talks became known as the "Spirit of Camp David," though it faded the next year after the U-2 incident. Its best-known moment came in September 1978, when Jimmy Carter brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to the camp for 13 days of negotiations. The resulting Camp David Accords, signed at the White House on September 17, 1978, led to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of March 1979.

Later presidents have used Camp David both for rest and for diplomacy. Bill Clinton hosted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat there in July 2000, but those talks ended without an agreement. George W. Bush met his national security team there in the days after the September 11 attacks. Barack Obama hosted the G8 summit at the camp in May 2012, and Joe Biden held a summit there with the leaders of Japan and South Korea in August 2023. The camp is closed to the public and does not appear on most maps of the surrounding Catoctin Mountain Park, which is run by the National Park Service and open to visitors.