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.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
Giscard was finally elected President of France, defeating Socialist candidate François Mitterrand by 425,000 votes—still the closest election in French history. At 48, he was the fourth youngest president in French history at the time, after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and Jean Casimir-Perier. In 2017, Emmanuel Macron, at the age of 39, became the youngest President in the history of France. He promised "change in continuity". He made clear his desire to introduce various reforms and modernise French society, which was an important part of his presidency. He for instance reduced from 21 to 18 the age of majority and pushed for the development of the TGV high speed train network and the Minitel, a precursor of the Internet. He promoted nuclear power, as a way to assert French independence. In 1975 he invited the heads of government from West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States to a summit in Rambouillet, to form the Group of Six major economic powers (now the G7, including Canada). Economically, Giscard's presidency saw a steady rise in personal incomes, with the buying power of workers going up by 29% and old age pensioners by 65%.