Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman originally called the Maryland presidential retreat, which opened in 1938, “Shangri-La” after the fictional Himalayan paradise. Dwight Eisenhower, however, wanted a less formal moniker so he renamed it in 1953 in honor of his 5-year-old grandson, David. “Shangri-La was just a little fancy for a Kansas farm boy,” he wrote in a 1953 letter to friend Edward “Swede” Hazlett. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was brought by Eisenhower to the retreat, thought it sounded like a place where “stray dogs were sent to die,” but all subsequent chief executives have kept the name.
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