In reading his new memoir, On Call, I remembered why I admired him. His concern about his patients' plights, especially HIV patients, comes through clearly.

Unfortunately, Fauci's memoir omits vital details about his failures as an administrator, an adviser to politicians, and a key figure in America's public health response to infectious disease threats over the past 40 years. His life story is a Greek tragedy. Fauci's evident intelligence and diligence are why the country and the world expected so much of him, but his hubris caused his failure as a public servant.

It is impossible to read Fauci's memoir and not believe he was genuinely moved by the plight of AIDS patients. Since the first time he learned of the illness from a puzzling and alarming case report, his laudable ambition has been to conquer the disease with drugs and vaccines, cure every patient, and wipe the syndrome from the face of the earth. He is both sincere and correct when he writes that "history will judge us harshly if we don't end HIV."

When an aide in 1985 offered to quit when he contracted AIDS for fear of scandal at Fauci's beloved National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci hugged him, declaring "Jim, you crazy son of a bitch, there is no way in the world I would ever let you go." This was Fauci at his best.

But Fauci paints an incomplete picture of his attitude toward AIDS patients in its early days. In 1983, in response to a case report of an infant with AIDS published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci told the press that AIDS might be spread by routine household contact. There was no good evidence then and is none now to suggest that HIV is transmitted that way. But Fauci's statement, prominently echoed in the media, panicked the American people, almost certainly leading many to physically shun AIDS patients out of an unfounded fear of catching the disease.

Fauci does not address this incident, so one is left to speculate about why he was attracted to this theory. One possibility is that there was little political support for government spending on AIDS when the public thought it only affected gay men. As the public came to understand AIDS impacted broader populations, such as hemophiliacs and IV drug users, public support for funding HIV research expanded.

Fauci was tremendously successful in eventually building public support for government spending on treating and trying to prevent the spread of AIDS. Likely no other scientist in history moved more money and resources to accomplish a scientific and medical goal than Fauci, and his memoir proves he was highly skilled in managing bureaucracy and getting his way both from politicians and from an activist movement that was at first highly skeptical about him. (One prominent AIDS activist, playwright Larry Kramer, once called Fauci a murderer.)