FOREIGN RELATIONS: Talks at Camp David

On hand to meet Harold Macmillan’s gleaming Comet 4 jet airliner at Washington’s MATS Air Terminal were Vice President Richard Nixon and Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter (who sat waiting on a metal stool to ease the pain of his arthritis). They hustled the British party to the White House behind screaming sirens. Next morning Macmillan and President Eisenhower drove to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had been pacing his sunroom floor awaiting their arrival.

Appearing thin and weary, Dulles nonetheless waved off Ike’s offer of a place on a sofa—”No, no, no”—and sat on a chair while the group posed for photographs under an Eisenhower oil portrait of Winston Churchill. The visit to Dulles, planned to last only 30 minutes, stretched on for nearly an hour as the leaders of the U.S. and Britain got down to the crisis of Berlin and West Germany. Indomitable John Foster Dulles drove home a vital point: let’s talk about East-West negotiations but not deals—and any negotiations must be two-sided, with the Soviets granting concrete concessions for every concession granted by the West.

Behind Barbed Wire. An Army helicopter stood ready on the grounds of the nearby Bethesda Naval Hospital to take the President, Prime Minister and British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd (who dislikes air travel in general and, from his appearance, helicopter travel in particular) to Camp David, the Maryland retreat of Presidents, where Franklin Roosevelt (who called it Shangri-La) met in secrecy with Winston Churchill during World War II. (Harry Truman had no use for the place.) Some lesser lights of the British party, who followed by helicopter and car, grumbled about being tucked away in such sylvan solitude.

Long a close-kept secret both as to precise location and physical description, Camp David last week was briefly opened to newsmen for a rare look. Its 184 acres on the east slope of Catoctin Mountain are surrounded by a 12-ft. barbed-wire fence, with Marine sentries endlessly pacing the perimeter—at night just inside a ring of blazing spotlights. Gravel walks wind amid wild cherry and red oak trees to converge on the President’s rustic-timber one-story cottage, named “Aspen” by Mamie Eisenhower. Leaning against one wall stood Dwight Eisenhower’s red and blue golf bag, while not far away is a putting green with five pitching tees ranging from 40 yds. to 120 yds.

Behind the Wall. Chris Herter, who had gone ahead from Washington, met the President, Macmillan and Lloyd in Aspen Cottage’s paneled living room. There, in the large room with its sofas, easy chairs, bridge tables, and huge fireplace bearing the presidential seal, most of the Eisenhower-Macmillan talks took place. They began after a 45-minute Eisenhower nap and lunch (tomato soup, cheese souffle, cottage pudding with lemon sauce). The first day, Herter, Lloyd, U.S. Ambassador to London John Hay Whitney and British Ambassador Sir Harold Caccia also participated in some of the discussions. Ike called for Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy, Deputy Defense Secretary Donald Quarles, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman John McCone and Science Adviser James Killian to attend next morning. Between conferences and dinner sessions, Ike and Macmillan drove together along winding roads and across mountain freshets through the Catoctin forests.

The talks continued behind a wall of privacy calculated to give the participants a chance to thresh out their problems without distractions. At least once a day, Ike’s deadpanned Press Secretary Jim Hagerty and Macmillan’s ebullient Pressman Peter Hope briefed newsmen at hectic conferences held in a Gettysburg gymnasium 25 miles away from Camp David. Reporters generally had to follow Hagerty and Hope to their hotel rooms for private briefings on what the other briefings had actually been about. Then they returned to the gymnasium for still more clarifying explanations—from each other. But gradually, despite the privacy at Camp David and the confusion in Gettysburg, the substance of the Eisenhower-Macmillan talks began to spread into headlines.