Camp David in 1935 and was completed in 1938. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt converted it to a presidential retreat and renamed it "Shangri-La" (for the fictional Himalayan paradise in the 1933 novel "Lost Horizon" by British author James Hilton, which he had jokingly referenced as the source of the Doolittle Raid earlier that year). Camp David received its present name from Dwight D. Eisenhower, in honor of his father and grandson, both named David. The Catoctin Mountain Park does not indicate the location of Camp David on park maps due to privacy and security concerns, although it can be seen
Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower Western scholars has consistently held Eisenhower as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senator Robert A. Taft from Ohio were the two front-runners for the Republican Party presidential nomination going into the 1952 Republican presidential primaries. Also contending for the nomination were Governor Earl Warren of California, and former Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota. Taft led the conservative wing of the party, centered in the Midwest, that rejected many of the New Deal social welfare programs created in the 1930s, and generally held a non-interventionist foreign policy stance, believing that America should avoid alliances with foreign