Fauci’s Diaries Show a Doctor Who Forgot to Arm His Politics

The scene is clear enough: Anthony Fauci, sworn in before a House committee in June 2024, and again before a Senate committee on the origins of the virus, while a senator releases his pandemic-era diary notes to the public. In my day you needed a sack of intercepted letters to achieve this effect; now one “tranche” of private reflections suffices to put a man on trial before the entire people. Those who seek to hold him “accountable” say his handling of the pandemic was controversial. They do not content themselves with questioning his actions; they wish to rule on his soul. When enemies investigate your conscience, it is because they could not defeat your office.

I learned long ago that one must judge by the effectual truth of the thing, not by sermons about what ought to have been done. Here the effectual truth is that Fauci exercised leadership during a great public-health crisis, serving on official task forces and advising the head of state until 2022. His duty, like that of any minister, was to maintain the state by preserving lives and basic order amid confusion. Whether he chose the best technical course I do not know and will not pretend to know; what I can examine is whether he acted like a prudent political animal while he practiced his science. The physician may cure bodies; if he forgets the body of the republic, the cure will not endure.

The pandemic was a flood of fortune. In The Prince I compared fortune “to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings” (trans. W. K. Marriott). I added that princes succeed when they raise dykes and barriers in fair weather. Fauci did not control when the river rose; he controlled only how he prepared and how he stood when the waters came. Serving under two successive rulers gave him time and vantage. The question now pressed in hearings is whether, in those years, he built institutions, rules, and alliances that could withstand attack, or whether he trusted that necessity alone would vindicate him once the waters receded.

His present trouble shows how much power lies in appearance. Most people, as I wrote then, judge by the eyes rather than the hands. The release of his diary entries, and his own interviews discussing how he will face a Senate filibuster strategy, are struggles over narrative as much as over facts. One side wishes to frame him as a man who “skated … without accountability”; the other, as a servant finally explaining himself. A diary feels like unarmored truth, but once public it becomes another weapon. If your enemies control the stage where your private thoughts appear, they will direct even your sincerity against you.

A reformer without arms is only a schoolmaster. In my little book on princes I warned that one must have arms of one’s own, not rely on mercenaries or auxiliaries. Today arms mean coalitions, revenues, and offices that answer to you when the attack comes. Fauci appears now before committees whose leaders have authored reports accusing the administration he served of misleading the public. This tells me his arms were never his own; they belonged to the political structure around him. So long as that structure found him useful, he stood; once it needed a villain or a symbol, it exposed him. Unarmed prophets fail, even if their prophecies were correct.

There is a counterargument worth stating cleanly. One could say that a public-health officer must attend to evidence and biology, not to intrigues; that if he spent his time building factions he would neglect his proper task. But this is to imagine a world where decisions are weighed in a quiet laboratory, not in a republic riven by parties. The more your counsel touches everyday life, the more it threatens interests, and the more you must expect resistance. A man in Fauci’s position who does not prepare for open political combat is like a general who plans the campaign but ignores the enemy. Reality will not excuse him because his intentions were pure.

So how do I judge him, with the scant facts before me? He clearly possessed enough virtù to maintain his post through the height of the storm and across rulers, which is no small feat. Yet the fact that, years later, he faces coordinated efforts to redefine his whole record through hearings and private writings suggests he neglected the second half of prudence: to ensure that decisions taken under necessity can be defended under tranquillity. When I see a man’s reputation fought over more fiercely than his actual powers, I infer that power has already slipped from his hands. Those who do not arm their reforms at the beginning will see others rewrite them at the end.