Camp David is where U.S. presidents go to relax and escape Washington’s prying eyes
Camp David, the rustic presidential retreat in the mountains of Maryland, has been a backdrop for signal moments in U.S. foreign policy, perhaps none more notable than the peace accord President Jimmy Carter brokered between Egypt and Israel in 1978.
On Friday, President Joe Biden will reach for his own place in Camp David lore, hoping that walks on leafy trails and necktie-free talks with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol will encourage the U.S. allies, who have been thawing their frosty relationship, to cooperate more given their shared concerns about aggression from China and North Korea.
It will be the first time that Biden has hosted world leaders at the secluded retreat nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, about an hour’s drive northwest of the White House.
Run by the Navy, guarded by Marines and less imposing than the White House, Camp David was a deliberate choice by a president who puts a premium on face-to-face interactions with his foreign counterparts, Biden aides said.
“One of the interesting things about Camp David is that it provides a less formal venue for presidents and their visitors to really get to know each other on a one-to-one basis,” said Sarah Fling, a historian at the White House Historical Association.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Margaret Thatcher, a successor to Churchill, are just a few of the storied world figures who have spent time at Camp David at the invitation of U.S. presidents.
President Barack Obama assembled leaders of the world’s largest economies for a Group of Eight summit in 2012, the biggest foreign contingent to ever gather there.
President Donald Trump tweeted in September 2019 that he had canceled a secret meeting planned for Camp David with Taliban and Afghanistan leaders after an American soldier was among those killed in a bombing in Kabul.
To produce the Camp David Accords, Carter sought an intimate location, a place away from the press where he thought Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin would be encouraged to talk to one another.
