by Gore Vidal AFTER POLITICS, JOURNALISM has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater. American exceptions to mediocrity’s leaden mean: From column A, there was Franklin D. Roosevelt. From column B, H.L. Mencken. Although Henry Louis Mencken was a magazine editor (The Smart Set, The American Mercury), a literary critic, an expositor of Nietzsche, and a school Continue Reading →