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The Kennedys kept Jackie's and Caroline's horses stabled at Camp David, but the President was at first a reluctant visitor. The family was planning a private country home in Virginia. Only as J.F.K. began using the Government retreat more did he finally ask, "Why are we building Atoka when we have a wonderful place like this for free?"
The L.B.J. Ranch was a little too far away for regular visits, so Lyndon Johnson used to chopper off to the camp with three or four friends in tow. He also found the retreat an ideal locale for some Viet Nam War jawboning with skeptics like Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson. Recalls L.B.J. Aide Jack Valenti: "It was a frosty meeting, but they parted friends. There's something about Camp David that makes you feel softer."
Safer is more the way Richard Nixon viewed it. Turning the hideaway into a virtual hideout during the Watergate era, Nixon would spend long hours in his favorite armchair next to Aspen's massive central fireplace, with legal pads on his knee, trying to explain away the crisis.
Before his Watergate days, Nixon used Camp David to draft many of his important speeches. In his first term alone, Nixon made nearly 120 trips to the camp, refurbished Aspen into a posh home and converted the cluster of other cabins into a mini-White House. Nixon also added new cabins to the grounds, one of which was used by Daughter Tricia and Edward Cox on their honeymoon. Tricia aptly called it a "resort hotel where you are the only guests."
Nixon sometimes offered the retreat to others—to Henry Kissinger to ponder the state of the world and to John Dean to whitewash the state of the coverup. Dean, like his boss, found Camp David conducive to "hard reflective work. It's as close to being away and still being plugged in as anything the Government has."
Jimmy Carter, too, is a private person, and about once a month he has found that Camp David perfectly suits his need to get away from the Capital.
Last week he and his first foreign guest were offered among other things a sampling of new movies, including one that Carter has lately seen several times, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.