53 collection. Once they arrived, the prime minister noted that, for about thirty minutes, his American partner absorbed himself with reviewing new “specimens” from large envelopes Watson had brought along and placed them in their proper locations in his collector’s books. Churchill also remembered the complete attention and total “silence” Roosevelt gave the collection “and so forgot the cares of State.”6 Churchill’s recollections demonstrate the importance of Shangri-La for the remainder of Roosevelt’s life. FDR found that having such a nearby “secret” location to rest for a few days, as opposed to his estate at Hyde Park or the cottage at Warm Springs with their high visibility and access to the press, provided a different and more complete type of respite. As one of Roosevelt’s main biographers, Kenneth S. Davis, writes, “Shangri-la would exert almost as important an environmental influence upon him and, through him, upon the course of great events as … Hyde Park and Warm Springs … [There] Roosevelt wove the absorbent blanket he wrapped round his innermost self to relieve tensions, sooth anxieties, cushion pressures, hide insecurities, smother impatience, and soak away the ache of indecision and the sharp pain that often accompanied decision itself.” Davis adds that it was at Shangri-La, like FDR’s “strong, simple religious faith,” as well as his “various and peculiar forms of prayer,” where he martialed reserves of strength that effectively aided Roosevelt in verifying the “rightness of [his] decisions” and then “shifting from himself” to God “the responsibility of [those often terrible] consequences” of his decisions. Davis further opines that this “enabled [President Roosevelt] to bear ... the crushing weight of the world.”7 Although David McCullough, President Harry Truman’s best biographer, makes no mention in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Truman using the Catoctin retreat during his presidency, Truman and his wife, Bess, utilized it despite the fact that Truman’s daughter, Margaret, their only child, despised and avoided it. Margaret Truman regarded it a “terrible” place. In fact, Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, initially planned to close the camp. But as mentioned above, President Eisenhower visited the formerly named Shangri-La not long after his inauguration in 1953. After the weekend stay, his wife, Mamie, however, apparently agreed with Margaret Truman’s LEADERS, LEADERSHIP, AND “SANCTUARY”: A FOCUS ON SIX U.S. PRESIDENTS AND THE PROBLEM OF REST
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