History of the Soviet Union (1953–64)
Khrushchev anxiously awaited the results of the 1960 United States presidential election, preferring Kennedy to Richard Nixon, whom he took as a hardline anti-communist cold warrior, and openly celebrated the former's victory on November 8. In truth however, Khrushchev's opinion of Kennedy was mixed. He knew that the new president was from a wealthy background and Harvard-educated. On the other, Kennedy was the youngest elected US president at 43 and gave off the impression of inexperience and "a boy wearing his father's pants" that Khrushchev assumed he could pounce on and dominate. If however Kennedy was that weak, there stood the possibility that he could merely be a puppet of "reactionary" forces and the US military-industrial complex. Almost immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, Khrushchev attempted to barrage the president-elect with proposals and the hope of improved US-Soviet relations, specifically turning the clock back to the accommodating diplomatic atmosphere of President Roosevelt's time. However, Khrushchev was informed that he was acting too quickly and it would not be possible to have a formal summit with Kennedy until he took office in January, and even then, arranging such a meeting would still take time.
William Henry Harrison
Harrison returned to private life in Ohio until 1836, when he was nominated for the presidency as the Whig Party candidate in the election of that year; he was defeated by Democratic Vice President Martin Van Buren. In 1840, the Party nominated Harrison again, with John Tyler as his running mate. Harrison and Tyler, known famously as "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too", defeated Van Buren in the 1840 election. Harrison was the oldest person to be elected president until Ronald Reagan in 1980 and later Donald Trump in 2016. Harrison died of pneumonia a month after taking office, and Tyler assumed the presidency, setting a major precedent in succession. Due to Harrison's brief time in office, scholars and historians often forgo listing this president in historical rankings.