a desperately earnest man

Taking a little short glance into Finnegan's Wake, by James Joyce, caused me to pine for Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower.

Knew Finnegan's Wake was difficult...it's really really difficult.  Even the Prologue explaining why it's difficult, is difficult.

[excerpt, Ike and Dick, by Jeffrey Frank]:
On the surface, the two men could not have been less alike.  Nixon was a talented speaker, but he often seemed miserable in his political appearances; the journalist Russell Baker saw him as "a painfully lonesome man undergoing an ordeal," and sympathized with "his discomfort with the obligatory routines of his chosen profession."

As a public man, he knew that he was unloved and sometimes spoke of the pain that cartoonists inflicted ("I'm not exactly amused to see myself pictured as a lowbrow moron," he said of the Herblock drawings that appeared with some regularity in the Washington Post).

The features that so delighted caricaturists -- the close-set eyes, dark, heavy brows, what Garry Wills called his "spatulate nose" -- were all the more striking in contrast to those of Eisenhower, who had an expressive, mobile face...and that dazzling grin -- a spectacular display of surface warmth.  Ike's appearance sometimes seemed to change as new thoughts occurred to him, which made him seem, as the military historian B.H. Liddell Hart observed, spontaneous and transparently honest.

Despite that surface candor, though Eisenhower was as private a man as Nixon....He [Nixon] came to realize that the president might refer to him in embracing terms -- "We are very close. . . . I am very happy that Dick Nixon is my friend" -- just as he was aiming to be rid of him.

...While Nixon acquired and kept a reputation for duplicity, Eisenhower was equally accomplished in the arts of deception and misdirection.  He had no trouble ordering Nixon to undertake some of his nastiest chores, such as firing his top White House aide, and he tried to disassociate himself from Nixon's meanest campaign rhetoric, as if his vice president was speaking for someone else.

...Nixon was always alert to the trap that he'd gotten himself into:  doing what the party and the president expected of him could undermine his future, and it could be worse for him if he rebelled.  It was a costly bargain.  He was always on call to express the angry id of the party, but when he did so his opponents would resurrect a label he acquired in his 1950 Senate race:  "Tricky Dick."

Because of this dilemma, Nixon often acted in a certain carefully controlled way; in his perfect, modulated responses, there was an aura of artifice -- not exactly calculating but as if he were measuring and judging each word, the "tight-lipped, over-tense, and slightly perspiring manner of a desperately earnest man determined to make no slightest mistake, but not quite at home and not likely to be," in the words of William S. White.----------------------- [end excerpt.  Ike And Dick:  Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage, by Jeffrey Frank.  Simon & Schuster.  2013]

I don't think I would have put the word "marriage" in the title; but -- everybody has their own ideas.  These two mid-twentieth-century Republican presidents did end up being related by marriage -- when Pres. Eisenhower's grandson and Pres. Nixon's daughter Julie married, in 1968. 

I remember that, sort of -- I was in grade school, and I kind of had the concept that Eisenhower's son and Nixon's daughter were married.  And my mother tried to adjust the concept -- no, it was former president Eisenhower's grand-son and Pres. Nixon's daughter -- and I remember the momentary confusion -- What?  It was easier for my brain to process this topic, which was only marginally interesting to me anyway, when there were only two generations involved.  But that was only in my head....

And can remember Tricia Nixon's wedding, at the White House -- that would be glamorous and exciting, I thought.  We looked at wedding photograph in newspaper:  my mother said, "She has her daddy's nose."

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