Pop quiz: Where do presidents vacation and hold historic events? Answer: Camp David.

Summertime for many Americans means escaping to sleep under starry skies at a favorite lake or summer camp.

For chief executives since Franklin Roosevelt, getting away begins with Camp David, the presidential retreat more than 60 miles north of the White House, a rustic refuge that has become a hideaway to recharge, a sanctuary to deliberate big decisions and a woodsy setting for global diplomacy. 

“The president comes from a different world,” said Mike O’Connor, the camp’s commanding officer from 2001-03. “At Camp David, he can set some of that aside.” 

The 125-acre compound was built in 1938 in western Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Park as a campsite for federal employees and their families. After looking at several alternatives, Roosevelt came to the site, draped in the shade of oak, ash and hickory trees, and announced, “This is my Shangri-la.” Even after it was built up into a presidential retreat, it was rustic: The walls of the dozen cabins were left unpainted, a wagon wheel chandelier hung in the main dining room and the furniture was scavenged from military warehouses. 

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Roosevelt liked to sit on the porch of the presidential cabin, working on his stamp collection or enjoying a cocktail. (His Scottish terrier, Fala, had a doghouse next door.) But World War II was always as close as the telephone linked to the White House switchboard.

FDR began the tradition of inviting foreign leaders to join him, like British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose spring 1943 visit included war planning discussions.

As much as Roosevelt loved his getaway, its future wasn’t assured. Harry Truman preferred to unwind in Key West, Florida. Dwight Eisenhower was ready to shut the site down as a cost-saving measure.

But when Eisenhower’s attorney general sent him a “Petition for Executive Clemency” to spare the camp, the president relented, adding a helicopter landing pad − he was the first to use a helicopter as president − that shortened the trip from the White House to just half an hour. He installed a small golf course, grilled on a new patio and practiced his oil painting under the trees.

Eisenhower even renamed it “Camp David,” in honor of his 5-year-old grandson. 

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While it’s not posh, Camp David has become one of the world’s most exclusive resorts. A main cabin called Laurel Lodge offers conference rooms, a dining room and a small presidential office. Other buildings host a library, game room, a gym and a movie theater.

A fleet of golf carts shuttle guests and staff (with the president’s vehicle dubbed Golf Cart One). An octagonal wood and stained glass chapel seats up to 150, with a Navy chaplain presiding. White-tailed deer roam the grounds, sometimes munching on flower beds.

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Even when they bring along briefing books, intelligence reports and pending decisions, the novelty of slowing down amid the hilltop trees can be transformative for overworked White House visitors.

“The Camp David air smells different,” said President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire. “There you are on top of the mountain, closer to God or whatever it is that moves people about mountaintops.” 

The camp’s isolation also makes it ideal for the deeper thinking that big policy decisions demand.

After the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy brought former President Eisenhower to Camp David to seek his counsel.

President Lyndon Johnson gathered his top advisers in 1965 at Camp David to debate the historic decision to escalate American involvement in the war in Vietnam – and brought many of them back three years later to plan peace talks. 

Nixon flew his top economic advisers and Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns there in August 1971 to map out his decision to unlink the U.S. dollar from the price of gold, remaking the global monetary system. “I find that up here on top of a mountain, it is easier for me to get on top of the job,” Nixon told reporters. During the Watergate scandal, it was at Camp David that President Nixon asked for the resignations of his top aides, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman. 

Camp David as the presidential getaway

For many presidents, Camp David has been a perfect getaway for personal diplomacy with foreign leaders: “It cements a different friendship than simply having a fancy event amid gleaming silver and glittering chandeliers,” wrote first lady Laura Bush.

After Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the camp in 1959, when he watched Westerns with President Eisenhower and toured the nearby Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, he returned home and talked about the “spirit of Camp David.” (Nearly 15 years later, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev raced a new Lincoln Continental, a gift from President Nixon, around the camp’s narrow, curvy roads.)

When President Barack Obama hosted the annual Group of Eight summit of foreign leaders at Camp David in 2012, wrote former camp commander Michael Giorgione in his memoir "Inside Camp David," the overflowing delegations taxed water pressure in the cabins and sparked a golf cart shortage. But after their second day of meetings, the leaders huddled behind a conference table to watch an international soccer championship.

When it’s time to unwind, Camp David offers many ways to escape. Johnson took up bowling. Nixon installed a heated swimming pool. Ronald Reagan rode horseback – and when movies he had starred in were screened on Friday nights at the camp theater, he shared behind-the-scenes stories. George H.W. Bush had a horseshoe pit installed there (Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s first-ever throw was a ringer). George W. Bush took morning mountain biking rides with guests and aides.

President Obama enjoyed celebrating his birthday at Camp David, competing with friends in a two-day “campathlon” that featured a home run derby, a football toss, skeet shooting, bowling, pool, darts and three-on-three basketball on a court with a large presidential seal in the middle.  

Camp David has also provided lifetime memories for first families. President George H.W. Bush’s daughter Dorothy had her wedding at the chapel, and President Johnson’s daughter Lynda Bird and Chuck Robb honeymooned there. The Clintons liked to spend Thanksgiving at Camp David, and Presidents Clinton and Obama gave their daughters driving lessons on the grounds.

As for presidential dogs cooped up amid White House finery, getting away offers a one-of-a-kind chance to run and roam. “Camp David,” Lady Bird Johnson once said, “is more a psychological journey than a physical one.” 

Jimmy Carter helped negotiate peace at Camp David

Camp David’s most celebrated moment came in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter hosted 13 long days of negotiations between Egypt and Israel, which had fought four major wars in the previous three decades. "We were looking for a place to get the leaders (and their senior advisers) away from really everything,” explained Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell. 

The negotiations were tense and prone to breaking down, and Carter shuttled between the leaders’ cabins between joint meetings. “The close proximity of the living quarters,” he later wrote, “engenders an atmosphere of both isolation and intimacy, conducive to easing tension and encouraging informality.” At one point the president had to block both leaders from leaving the room to keep the talks going. 

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The Camp David staff stretched to support the needs of 100 staff brought by the leaders. Kosher food was prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his team in a separate kitchen and transported to the dining hall by golf cart.  

Camp David’s setting and atmosphere were critical to the ultimate success of the talks, providing respites for negotiators to recharge from intense sessions. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat took long trail walks and played chess with national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. 

When Carter took Sadat and Begin to visit Gettysburg, he sat between them on the drive up, warning them not to discuss negotiations during what he wanted to be a respite from their tensions. The camp’s movie house ran 24/7, showing 58 movies that included "Doctor Zhivago" and "The Return of the Pink Panther."

No one ever predicted that a mountaintop compound would become a critical tool for the modern presidency, offering a unique place to make history or just recharge from the pressures of world leadership. “If I get to return to this world, I’d like to come back to Camp David,” first lady Betty Ford wrote in her diary. “The air, the trees, the sky – it’s paradise.” 

As former White House staffer Ken Khachigian put it, “It’s where a president can be a human being again.”

Stewart D. McLaurin is president of the White House Historical Association, a private nonprofit, nonpartisan organization founded by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961.