The Day Einstein Turned Down a Presidency — and 9 Facts Nobody Tells You

In November 1952 the most famous scientist alive opened a letter offering him a country. He said no — and the man who sent it was secretly relieved. Here is the full story of the day Albert Einstein turned down the presidency of Israel, and nine other things about him that almost nobody knows.

Einstein in his seventies — the age at which he was asked to become a head of state.

The offer

Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president and himself a chemist, died on 9 November 1952. The young state needed a successor who could command the world’s respect, and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had one name in mind. On 17 November, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Abba Eban, wrote to Einstein at Princeton with a formal offer: the presidency of Israel, on the understanding that he would move to the country and take citizenship.

Einstein was 73, in poor health, and had spent his life avoiding exactly this kind of thing. He replied within days.

“I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.”— Albert Einstein to Abba Eban, November 1952

What makes the story better is Ben-Gurion’s reaction. According to his assistant, the prime minister had admitted before the letter went out: “I’ve had to offer the post to him because it’s impossible not to. But if he accepts, we are in trouble.” The job went instead to the historian Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who was elected on 10 December 1952 and served until his death in 1963. Einstein died two and a half years after the offer, in April 1955, still a Princeton professor.

Nine more Einstein facts almost nobody knows

1. His Nobel Prize wasn’t for relativity. The 1921 prize cited the photoelectric effect — the committee considered relativity too controversial to reward.
2. He gave the Nobel money to his ex-wife. His 1919 divorce agreement with Mileva Marić promised her the prize money if he ever won; he transferred the full amount — worth more than ten times a professor’s annual salary — when it arrived in 1922.
3. The FBI kept a 1,427-page file on him, tracking his pacifist and civil-rights activity for 22 years. J. Edgar Hoover never found anything to charge him with.
4. His brain was stolen. Within hours of his death in 1955, pathologist Thomas Harvey removed Einstein’s brain without family permission and kept it in jars — for over 40 years, some of it in a cider box under a beer cooler. Pieces are now in museums in Philadelphia and Princeton.
5. His last words are lost. He spoke them in German to a night nurse at Princeton Hospital who didn’t understand the language.
6. He co-invented a refrigerator. With physicist Leo Szilard he patented a fridge with no moving parts in 1930, after reading about a family killed by a leaking refrigerator gas.
7. The famous tongue photo was his 72nd birthday. Tired of photographers on 14 March 1951, he stuck his tongue out at Arthur Sasse — then ordered nine prints for himself because he liked it.
8. Your GPS runs on his equations. Satellite clocks tick about 38 microseconds a day faster than ground clocks because of relativity; without the correction, GPS would drift by 10 km a day.
9. He is still being proved right. Gravitational waves, which he predicted in 1916, were detected in 2015 — 99 years later — and the first photograph of a black hole in 2019 matched his equations exactly.

Myth busters

Two Einstein “facts” everyone shares that are wrong

✗Einstein failed maths at school.
He mastered calculus by 15 and topped his class in maths and physics. The myth comes from a changed grading scale at his Swiss school, where 6 became the top mark instead of 1.

✗Einstein worked on the atomic bomb.
He signed the 1939 letter warning Roosevelt that Germany might build one, but was never cleared to work on the Manhattan Project — the FBI file saw to that. He later called the letter his “one great mistake”.

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Sources: Jewish Virtual Library – Eban’s letter and Einstein’s reply (full text) · History.com – the presidency offer · History.com – Nobel money, FBI file, brain · The Marginalian – the divorce agreement · Snopes – fact check of the offer

Last fact-checked: October 2026.