Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves
In June, 2021, as both Donald Trump’s Presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to be receding into the past, the syndicated columnist Froma Harrop praised Anthony Fauci for his fortitude in withstanding ongoing partisan attacks. “Fauci,” she predicted, “will end his long career with a legacy of public service and, importantly, his dignity intact.”
This was, alas, not to be. Harrop’s column is among a number of media clippings Fauci preserved in his diary, a surreally mortifying document released to the public last week by Senator Rand Paul. Years later, the pandemic continues to haunt American politics: Paul, a long-standing Fauci antagonist, had subpoenaed the doctor to testify on the origins of the pandemic and the government’s response; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s team at the Department of Health and Human Services reportedly provided Paul with more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s diary entries, saved on government servers. The diary begins at the end of 2019 and runs through Fauci’s departure from government service, in 2022, after nearly forty years as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It begins, to put a fine point on things, with this sentence: “Over the years I have helped Dionne Warwick to find physicians for herself and her colleagues.”
I have trouble imagining that Fauci actually began his recordkeeping here—that the starting point does not represent an editorial intervention. So neatly does this lone entry from December, 2019, tee up the humiliations to come, the vein of material most clearly intended to assail Fauci’s dignity, by which I mean: the celebs.
As the novel coronavirus overtook daily life, in the spring of 2020, our celebrities occupied uneasy terrain. On one hand, they were bastions of business as usual, unelected avatars expected to embody norms and shared ideals; Tom Hanks testing positive for COVID was, accordingly, a moment when, for many, the pandemic became “real.” On the other hand, they were outlier aberrations, whose experience of the world was already so cloistered and carefully controlled that, say, grocery shopping (much less working at a grocery store) represented an abstract concern. Such was the outlook that could produce, for example, Gal Gadot’s “Imagine” sing-along. What was a famous person to do in 2020? One answer, evidently, was to call up (or to e-mail, or to conduct a podcast interview with) Anthony Fauci.
“Please know I deeply appreciate the important and consistent work you are doing to assist our country during this difficult and challenging time,” Barbra Streisand wrote, in a representative overture, from May, 2020. “I wanted to share a recent video I put together to honor the heroic efforts of essential workers.”
Fauci—to judge by the diary—revels. He basks. He reproduces tributes in full. He is an immunologist with seemingly no antibodies against the charms of stardom. He notes that his interlocutors are “absolutely fabulous” (Julia Roberts), “really wonderful” (Alan Alda), “amazingly intelligent, funny, extremely likeable” (Alec Baldwin). The famous well-wishers tallied here also include Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Orlando Bloom, Amy Poehler, Magic Johnson, Steve Buscemi, Tyra Banks, Stephen Colbert, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Francis Ford Coppola, Isabella Rossellini, Marisa Tomei, John Turturro, Neil Sedaka, Bob Cousy, Ava DuVernay, José Andrés, Clive Davis, Venus Williams (but “not so much Serena”), Jimmy Kimmel, Brad Pitt, Stanley Tucci, Bono, and Eddie Vedder, who reminds him of Bono. Kelly Ripa “stepped out” in a sweater that said “Fauci,” the Daily Mail reports, and Fauci duly records. His descriptions of celebrity encounters are wide-eyed—Olivia Rodrigo is a “new sensational young entertainer.” Still, he finds himself enjoying a certain degree of newfound intimacy. Nine months after he first receives a note from Streisand, she’s calling him on his cell to discuss mRNA-vaccine safety, in light of her recent bout of shingles (“zoster with lesion on hip/buttock,” he notes, clinical). He tells her not to worry, and they begin to discuss “life in general”:
This does not sound like power-mad self-aggrandizement, whatever Fauci’s Senate antagonists might say. Rather, it is one of the diary’s many passages that made me think of my own old diaries, which today I find unreadable—filled with compliments hoarded and recorded, with small, keenly felt vanities. What was it like to be the person who picked up a photo of herself in costume after a performance of “Twelfth Night,” cut herself out, and taped herself in her diary? I feel very far from her now, but I’m pretty sure I thought my skin looked good that night. I never experienced a minor success I couldn’t wonderingly, diligently detail, and it wasn’t because I thought that I deserved it or that anyone else would remember it, or because I felt any confidence whatsoever that such a bounty would come again. I think I believed very strongly that a permanent record was accumulating somewhere, and that only the things I wrote down really counted. I was keeping score. I was, in my defense, a sixteen-to-twenty-two-year-old student in the throes of a very self-conscious coming of age. But, of course, during the period that the diary records, Fauci was undergoing a transformation of his own: he was becoming a celebrity.
Joan Baez, yet another famous fan, emerges as one of the diary’s recurrent characters, and a kind of guiding spirit for this metamorphosis. She enters his orbit after a mutual friend informs Fauci that she is now “an accomplished portrait artist,” and that she has painted a portrait of him. Soon she is sending a note (“a beautiful note,” he writes) informing him that, even as people have told her “over and over” how important she is to them, she’s always ignored it; she hopes he won’t make the same mistake. “You are doing nonviolent resistance every time you stand up in front of the cameras,” she tells Fauci, offering to help him however she can. Then a closing thought strikes her. “On rereading this I see that parts of it might be appropriate to put up on my face book page,” she writes—provided he has no objections. Presumably he does not, because a few days later she texts to say how well her post is doing. “Over three million views,” she writes, sounding as if she’s perched on his shoulder with a tiny pitchfork. “Is this fun or what?”
They stay in touch. “You are a rock star and I am a badass,” Baez writes, at one point, in reply to a birthday message from the doctor. Eventually, she asks him to accompany her to the Kennedy Center Awards, where, he reports, he receives the “gushing” attentions of Trisha Yearwood, Dick Van Dyke, Debbie Allen, and “Broadway legend Chita Rivera.”
Fauci never says what he thinks of Baez’s portrait, but it reproduces his likeness with approximately the same fidelity as the bobbleheads whose sales figures he records elsewhere. He is rendered through a collection of recognizable attributes—glasses, blue shirt, close-set eyes, and boyishly combed hair. (Baez adds to this sketch a background of scattered stars.)
What is it like to be a bobblehead? Fauci reached the summit of his career only to become the kind of cultural figure that’s simultaneously a kitsch object and a political lightning rod: a resistance hero. This was a familiar type by the end of Trump’s first term. A story in the Washington Post, from March, 2020, reports on Fauci doughnuts sold at a Rochester bakery, and compares his following—and its merch—to those of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Robert Mueller. Fauci, like Ginsburg and Mueller before him, had been drafted into a Manichaean battle between good and Trump. It’s a role that sits oddly alongside the reality of Fauci’s working life, which involves a lot of respectful and even friendly hobnobbing with the denizens of Trump world. Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pence, and Katie Miller are all treated warmly in the diary; Trump himself is scrutinized and managed, not “resisted.” Such, after all, is the life of a bureaucrat. Fauci is not hugely introspective on the page, but he still conveys some ambivalence toward the scale of his growing renown. “Complete craziness with this Fauci cult hero stuff,” he writes, of the doughnuts, even as he pastes the full article into the diary.
“The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable,” he writes elsewhere, that spring. “I am the most famous and talked about person in the country.” He can scarcely keep up with all the articles about him, although he does try. In the two years that follow, as vaccines roll out and the world reopens, he faces his own changed reality. He goes to pick up takeout and gets mobbed by “squealing and screaming and clapping” fans requesting selfies. “It was a little bit embarrassing,” he reflects, “but it was just a manifestation of how people need a symbol of integrity and truth.” (This is immediately followed by Baez texting to ask what she should wear to a State Department dinner.)
More troubling than the crowds is the flickering recognition that being a symbol is not necessarily a good thing. His pop-culture canonization for one portion of the country has been met with an inverse reaction for much of the rest. In October, 2021, adopting an uncharacteristically heightened register, he writes:
During the Biden era, references to the Big Lie—Trump’s election denial and all it entails—become Fauci’s habitual shorthand for understanding his own situation. Interviewers begin to ask him whether his polarizing stature might hamper his effectiveness as a public-health spokesperson—a reasonable question. He dismisses their concern. “I am such a valued spokesperson and a good communicator that the President and the Administration want very much for me to be out there,” Fauci writes, after one such exchange with Ted Koppel. “He got that and agreed, but it is interesting that he even brought it up.”
Fauci does not seem to see a relationship between the adulation and the villainization—to understand that he’s hated for being beloved, perhaps more than for loving the truth. One day, he is doing a podcast interview with Alec Baldwin (“Without a doubt, from a intellectual and substantive standpoint it was one of the best if not the best interview that I have ever given”). The next, he is confronted with a poll suggesting “that middle to right people want me to retire and are not getting vaccinated because I’m the messenger telling them to get vaccinated.” But the emotional charge of his celebrity defies his self-conception as a neutral arbiter. One of the sharpest ironies in the diary is how often the good press that he quotes praises him for his modesty and his lack of ego. The Fauci mythos was incompatible with the actual work of being Fauci.
As 2022 passes, though, the possibility of private life tentatively reappears. Fauci takes a weekend vacation and bird-watches. He gets COVID and misses his daughter’s wedding. He begins to muse more frequently about leaving his job. When the time comes to make the announcement, he seems excited. “TODAY IS THE DAY!” he writes on August 22nd. (And then, inevitably: “There has been a literal avalanche of positive feedback about my announcement with hundreds and hundreds of texts and emails of congratulation and praise for me.”) He steps down from his post at the end of the year, three years after the diary began. He thought that he would be able to make it through his speech without choking up, he writes, but a section about his wife did it. “The ceremony,” he writes, “was exactly like I wanted it—no bells and whistles.” I think I believe him. ♦