My teenage daughter has a diary. It’s pink and, most important, has an elaborate lock on it. And if I could go back in time to 2020, I might send this exact sort of journal to Anthony Fauci. Every night, when he was finished sharing his thoughts about battling COVID, he could have locked it, scrambled the combination, and then buried it in his sock drawer, as I think my daughter does.
Before this weekend, I would never have dreamed of comparing the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases with a teenage girl. But now that I’ve seen his diary, I’m convinced that my daughter has a more secure way of expressing her most private thoughts. I’m also willing to bet she uses far fewer exclamation points than he does. “Stock Market crashing!” the president’s chief medical adviser writes on February 27, 2020. “Amazing day!” a few entries later. And on March 28, “WHAT A NIGHT!!!”
The contents of Fauci’s diary, revealed this past weekend and published online by Senator Rand Paul, are—there is no other way to put it—embarrassing to an excruciating degree. Eventually, we might read those notes differently, as a key text in the history of the coronavirus pandemic. But what we know right now is that during months when the country shut down, when panic and death dominated, Fauci was spending part of his time cataloging his own growing fame with the excitement of a child star who had been asked to sign an autograph for the first time.
“Brewery in Georgia named a beer after me,” he writes. “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China,” he adds on another day. “Intense publicity about me continues with stories of granmothers who have crushes on men. Petitions to vote me ‘Sexiest Man Alive.’” (All typos, just as embarrassing, are his.) He can’t seem to get enough of the attention. He compiles lists of famous people he has met or who have called to congratulate him. At times reading this, I truly worried about someone who would take a call from Dionne Warwick to talk about vaccines in a moment when the country really needed him to be a bit more focused.
What makes this all the more unfortunate is that most of these excited personal asides come right under his listing of the figures for infections and deaths. “Global—3,300,000/230,000; USA—1,130,000/66,000,” the entry begins for May 3, 2020, two months into the pandemic. And then he proceeds to write, “Fauci-maddness continues with multiple articles and every sort of paraphernalia and restaurant and foods named after me.”
[Read: The unmaking of Anthony Fauci]
Those looking to discredit Fauci will surely make hay of these journal entries, which run from December 2019 to December 2022. Besides the self-regard, what Paul has picked on is Fauci’s openness in the early months of the pandemic to considering the lab-leak theory, which he disputed and delegitimized when talking with the press. “We’ve probably never ever seen people so completely at odds with their private thoughts, and then publicly proclaiming the opposite of what they were truly saying in private,” Paul told reporters this week.
The U.S. senator from Kentucky seems to forget, however, that this is what a diary is for: private thoughts. Fauci’s mistake was not in recording what was going through his mind and lifting his ego, but in doing so on government servers, which are never, ever private. For this, the 85-year-old has only himself to blame.
Would we want to live in a world, though, in which people couldn’t keep diaries? In 2020, Fauci found himself in a strange position: a man asked to become an avatar of science and authority when Americans were desperate for some semblance of certainty. He was at high-level meetings in the White House every day, on television constantly, portrayed by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live. What he put down in his diary was an unfiltered procession of his thoughts and observations as he was living them. And they are not all banal and self-obsessed. He was also describing his encounters with the president. He was working through his ideas. He was transcribing debates about policy and parsing transmission rates. It’s a diary. And if he seems to have been endlessly tickled by his own fame, this is also valuable data of a different kind—insights into the kind of complexity that we all contain. In retrospect, what seems unfair is that we expected one man to make the whole country feel safe, and then were surprised to find out he’s only a human.
Many of us have probably kept a diary in our life. I did, in my 20s, although I’m sure that, as a self-serious young man, I insisted it was a “journal.” I stopped as my life became more settled in my 30s and 40s, when the contours of my identity—of whom I would marry, what my children would be like, what career I would have—went from sources of anxious speculation to my actual reality. Most of us keep diaries at precisely those moments when we feel unmoored, when we feel assaulted by new stimuli or are forced to question who we are or what is happening to the world around us—phases such as adolescence, or wartime, or crisis. Fauci probably needed a private outlet for processing all that he was experiencing, and it’s a good thing that a diary can provide that. Would Twitter have been a better place for him to air his uncertainties, along with the details of calls from Barbra Streisand?
Some personal diaries do become public, ideally long after the subject is dead. The great ones don’t just provide private solace; they also reveal much about the times when they were written—precisely because their focus is on the personal. Think of what we learn about the plague in mid-17th-century London while we read Samuel Pepys detailing his many infidelities, or what Victor Klemperer exposes about creeping intimidation in Nazi Germany even as he is being petty and judgemental when it comes to other Jews. What makes these diaries such meaningful documents is that they are written by fallible people. They preserve consciousness before history has become history. They show what it was like to inhabit uncertainty.
[Read: The lab-leak payback has begun]
I can’t claim that Fauci’s thoughts (both serious and silly) will have any lasting literary merit. In fact, I’m definitely not claiming this. But his not-so-secret thoughts do tell us something about the reality of the pandemic that he, and the rest of us, lived through—the frenzy and panic of it, and even the nervous exhilaration of living through what we all understood to be a sudden rupture in time. One day, historians might use this diary to help figure out what happens to a society under such pressure. They might see more clearly the way that people can become desperate for a savior, and realize what a fantasy it is to imagine that such people exist.
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