A historical retreat for Donald Trump

Trump may like it even less if he were aware of Camp David's associations with former US Presidents

Donald Trump’s decision to spend Fathers’ Day weekend at the official presidential retreat, Camp David, attracted unwarranted attention because this was his first holiday outside his lush Florida properties. The decision to go rough — by Mr Trump’s standards — may be grudging acknowledgement of mounting public criticism. At $20 million for his first 80 days in office, American taxpayers have footed about a fifth of the $97 million bill that his predecessor Barack Obama racked up during his eight-year tenure.

Predictably, the liberal media smirked because Camp David’s high-end rusticity (and limited golfing opportunities) were unlikely to appeal to 45’s taste for gaudy uber-luxury and 18-hole courses. “Camp David is very rustic. It’s nice, you’d like it. You know how long you’d like it? For about 30 minutes,” he once joked to a European journalist. 

History is not his strong suit but Mr Trump may like it even less if he were aware of its associations with former presidents whose views were as divergent as possible from his crude nationalism. The 1978 Camp David Accords, patiently brokered by Jimmy Carter, between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachim Begin, marked the first global name recognition of Camp David.

But the retreat started life in the 1930s as a part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programme, the sort of economic stimulus that is anathematic to Mr Trump’s free-market fundamentalism. It was expanded into a presidential retreat in 1942, after the US had entered the war against the Axis powers, a reversal of the aggressive isolationism embedded in the original America First slogan (which Steve Bannon purloined for Mr Trump’s inaugural speech). 

Roosevelt found Washington’s humid summers unbearable for his sinus problem. With the war on, escapes to his Hyde Park mansion in New York were out of the question.

As an alternative, a rudimentary recreation camp built 1,800 feet above sea level in the Catoctin Mountains was hurriedly expanded and refurbished. About two hour’s drive from Washington, Roosevelt was delighted with it. He flourished in this cool, dry air, opting to hide there from the press in the November cold of 1942, on the eve of the first biggest amphibious assault in American history — the Operation Torch landings in Morocco and Algeria — that changed the course of World War II.

It was the general who commanded the Allied forces in Operation Torch that gave the retreat the name by which it is known today. He named it for his five-year-old grandson, hoping to erase the memory of a popular predecessor. Before that, however, Dwight Eisenhower had considered closing it because — in ironic contrast to Mr Trump’s predilections — he thought it symbolised unwarranted luxury in those difficult post-war years. His wife convinced him to retain it.

The first post-war Republican president couldn’t have been more different from the 21st century’s second GOP incumbent. He derisively coined the term “military-industrial complex”, which appears to have become the centrepiece of Mr Trump’s jobs-revival agenda; launched an infrastructure-boosting programme that was more genuine than 45’s tax-break-led scheme; and enforced a Supreme Court ruling on equal education rights for African-Americans, scarcely a concern for today’s incumbent. 

Ironically, it was Russia (in its Soviet avatar) that provoked the biggest foreign policy crisis of Eisenhower’s career, and Camp David partly provided the backdrop. In 1959, Eisenhower’s invitation to Nikita Khrushchev for a private meeting there provoked panic among Kremlin bureaucrats. Such was the distrust and ignorance that they thought the venue was an internment camp at which the Russian leadership would be held hostage. The invitation was accepted once it was explained that Camp David was the Russian equivalent of a dacha. There, Eisenhower convinced Khrushchev to withdraw his ultimatum to western powers to leave Berlin and set the stage for a peace summit.

Eisenhower was at the retreat when he heard the Soviet announcement that an American U2 spy plane had been shot down over its airspace, which effectively stymied his grand rapprochement plans. As his biographer wryly commented: “Khrushchev and his colleagues may not have known where or what Camp David was, but they surely knew how to exploit an American miscue.”

Given the controversies swirling around him, Mr Trump may be interested to know that in 1973, with the Watergate investigation closing in, Richard Nixon commuted almost daily between the White House and Camp David by helicopter to avoid the press, creating a nightmare for his disgusted security detail.

After his visit, Mr Trump tweeted that Camp David was ‘a very special place’. The perfunctory nature of the communication suggests he is unlikely to be a frequent visitor. If he makes any kind of history, it’ll probably be at Mar-a-Lago.