ISRAEL: Einstein Declines

Twenty-four hours after Chaim Weizman, Israel's first President, was laid to rest, the enterprising editor of Israel's evening Maariv, in a signed editorial, proposed as his successor "the greatest Jew alive: Einstein."

The idea caught on: perhaps Israel might get a second president as big as the first. Quipped a government statistician: "He might even be able to work out the mathematics of our economy and make sense out of it." To peppery Premier David Ben-Gurion, who loves learning and knows, moreover, the value of an imposing name, the idea sounded fine. While...