he has clearly been set up for a massive and thunderous fall
“You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don't want to go to war with a president,” Fauci, who has been the country’s top infectious diseases expert through a dozen outbreaks and six presidents, told POLITICO in an interview Friday. “But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”
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Giving a president advice can be a heady experience. Fauci has done it dozens of times, for four Republicans and two Democrats. “There's a temptation that you have to fight to tell the president what you think he wants to hear. I’ve seen really good people do that,” says Fauci, who took over the agency in 1984, just a few years after switching his professional focus to a fast-emerging and then-mysterious new illness, HIV/AIDS.“
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“It's really, really tough because you have to be honest with the American public and you don't want to scare the hell out of them,” Fauci said. “And then other times, in attempts to calm people down, [leaders] have had people be complacent about it. This is particularly problematic in a ‘gotcha” town like Washington.”“
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But many challenges are still ahead, including sometimes contradicting the president he doesn’t want to “go to war” with. Fauci says it will be OK: he knows that “even if it’s uncomfortable” his years of truth-telling have earned him a backlog of respect.
The 79-year-old also has no plans of retiring anytime soon — not least because one of his top goals, developing an HIV vaccine, remains elusive.
“I feel like I'm 45. And I act like I'm 35,” Fauci said. “When I start to feel like I don't have the energy to do the job, whatever my age, I’ll walk away and write my book.”