The Forecast Outlives the Fame

By Michael Phillips | Riptide | Dead Reckoning

Eighty-two years apart, two men built their authority in a crisis on the same foundation: the cameras liked them. Whether that mattered as much as everyone insists — on both sides — is the more interesting question.

Col. Irving P. Krick was a weatherman for Hollywood before he was a weatherman for generals. He made his name in the 1930s correctly calling clear skies for the burning-of-Atlanta shoot on Gone with the Wind, then built a commercial forecasting business on the same salesman’s confidence that got him into Eisenhower’s war room for D-Day. His method — matching today’s weather map against historical patterns and betting the outcome repeats — struck the British-trained scientists around him as intuition dressed up as data. Contemporaries and later historians settled on a phrase for it: more showmanship than science.

Set against him was Group Capt. James Stagg, a Scottish meteorologist with no interest in rank or spotlight, who used real-time barometric readings to argue the opposite forecast. Eisenhower had to choose between them with an invasion fleet already loading. He chose Stagg, delayed the landing a day, and the rest is the version of the story everyone knows.

What survived wasn’t the forecast. It was the story people chose to tell about it.

It’s not quite the whole story. A more recent reconstruction of the actual weather data — the kind of receipts-check this column exists to do — found that the storm didn’t behave the way Stagg predicted either; it weakened and slid the wrong direction, and the workable window on June 6 arrived by a different mechanism than his forecast described. Krick, using the “unscientific” method, had also been arguing a pattern shift was coming. Both men, working from different methods, landed close enough to right. The tidy morality tale — rigorous science triumphs over vain showmanship — doesn’t survive contact with the record. What survived instead was the frame itself: showman versus scientist, style versus substance. That frame outlived the forecast by eight decades, and it’s still the one being reached for every time a public-facing expert’s fame becomes the story.

The tidy morality tale didn’t survive contact with the record.

Which brings us to this week.

Dr. Anthony Fauci spent Wednesday in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee invoking the Fifth Amendment 111 times over the course of the hearing — the first time in over 250 congressional appearances he’s done so — declining to answer the questions his subpoena was written to compel. His attorney was physically removed from the room after refusing to stop talking without being recognized. Paul closed the hearing by announcing the committee will reconvene next week to consider holding Fauci in contempt, arguing his preemptive pardon from President Biden voids any valid claim to the privilege. None of that happened in a vacuum — it happened days after Paul released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal pandemic diary, recovered from his government computer.

Whatever else it was, Wednesday’s hearing was also a performance for cameras on every side of the dais.

The hearing itself wasn’t short on theater from either chair. Paul opened by accusing Fauci of “aiding and abetting” pandemic lockdown policy. Fauci called Paul’s pursuit of him an “unhinged obsession.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal compared the proceeding to the McCarthy hearings. Sen. Josh Hawley baited Fauci into invoking the Fifth on his tie color and the day of the week before closing with “Contempt for this body and contempt for the American people.” Sen. Bernie Moreno dropped an expletive demanding Fauci apologize to a mother arrested at her son’s football game during lockdown enforcement, accusing him of following politicians who were “more interested in meeting a Kardashian than in the suffering of the American people” — the showman charge, delivered on the floor, in almost exactly the words this piece has been circling. Whatever else it was, Wednesday’s hearing was also a performance for cameras on every side of the dais — worth remembering before anyone claims the exclusive high ground of sober process over their opponent’s showmanship.

The diary is where Fauci’s own version of Krick’s Hollywood problem shows up, in his own handwriting. In May 2020, he wrote that his fame had become “explosive and really unimaginable” — by his own account, the most talked-about person in the country. Entries track his coverage in the Washington Post, his standing with CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, the White House’s efforts to manage his TV bookings, and — in a lighter register — a Brad Pitt impression on SNL, a Billy Crystal spoof, an email from Barbra Streisand, and his own collection of Fauci murals, masks and bobbleheads. Gov. Ron DeSantis, reacting to the release, called it a “vicious cycle” — adulatory coverage feeding vanity, vanity feeding a more theatrical public posture, the theatrical posture feeding more coverage.

If that were the whole record, it would be a fame problem and not much else. It isn’t the whole record. Ahead of the hearing, Paul flagged emails he says show Fauci soliciting his own award nominations — telling an NIH colleague, per Paul’s account, to nominate him and letting him draft the supporting material himself. That colleague, Charles Dinarello, put Fauci up for the $1 million Dan David Prize in 2020; Fauci won it in 2021. Dinarello’s own institute went on to receive roughly $1.8 million in NIAID grant funding after helping Fauci win it, and that same year Fauci told his staff he’d be “happy to” nominate Dinarello in turn for a $1.2 million prize of his own. None of this got flagged by federal ethics reviewers, who cleared the Dan David award as a legitimate private-foundation honor while blocking Fauci from taking money tied to institutions that received NIAID funding directly — so it isn’t a bribery story, and the record doesn’t show Fauci offering funding in exchange for a nomination. It’s something closer to what Krick was doing with his post-Hollywood consulting business: turning a position built on public trust into a private reputation economy, inside the rules, on your own initiative. That’s a sturdier receipt than a diary entry about feeling famous.

Reputation and evidence are not the same thing.

Vanity and unease sat in the same notebook.

Worth holding the other side of the ledger too, in the same entries: Fauci also wrote that the attention embarrassed him, that he worried about the security implications of “becoming an international celebrity” — a new protective detail, police outside his house — and that he was uncomfortable when coverage cast him as feuding with a president he described relationships with more warmly in private than the press assumed. Vanity and unease sat in the same notebook. That’s a truer picture than either side’s cleaned-up version of it.

Fame-consciousness and scientific error are two different charges.

Here’s the part worth sitting with, using the same scrutiny in both directions: none of that proves Fauci’s epidemiology was wrong, any more than Krick’s Hollywood resume proved his forecast was wrong. Fame-consciousness and scientific error are two different charges, and conflating them is exactly the move that let the Krick myth calcify into something simpler and less true than what actually happened at Southwick House. The diary is genuinely damaging as a character document — a public official who insisted the science spoke for itself was privately keeping score of his own press clippings. That’s worth reporting on its own terms. It isn’t, by itself, evidence about gain-of-function funding, the Wuhan lab, or anything the committee subpoenaed him to discuss — and collapsing the two lets both sides skip the harder argument for the easier one.

The forecast and the fame are two different records.

The forecast and the fame are two different records. This week, as in 1944, only one of them got asked about under oath — and as of Wednesday afternoon, that question still isn’t closed. The contempt vote next week decides whether it goes further.

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, the Boston Globe, the National WWII Museum, the American Meteorological Society, and the Cliff Mass Weather Blog on the Krick-Stagg forecast and its reexamination; CNN, NBC News, the Boston Globe, PBS News, the Washington Post, and STAT News on Wednesday’s Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing; the Christian Post, CBS News, NPR, the Washington Examiner, and Fox News on the contents of Fauci’s released diary, including the Dan David Prize nomination records.