Step 1 : Introduction to the question "Before Dwight Eisenhower renamed Camp David for his grandson, FDR named it what?"
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.