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:
