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Dick Carlson, Award-Winning Journalist, Political Whisperer and Father of Tucker Carlson, Dies at 84
Richard Carlson was the longest-serving director of Voice of America under the Reagan Administration The post Dick Carlson, Award-Winning Journalist, Political Whisperer and Father of Tucker Carlson, Dies at 84 appeared first on TheWrap.
Richard “Dick” Carlson, an award-winning journalist, political lobbyist and diplomat whose colorful – and often personally tragic – life took him from a Boston orphanage to the highest levels of media, business and American political power, has died. He was 84.
His son, former Fox News host and conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, confirmed his death Wednesday on X, saying he died at his home in Boca Grande, Florida, after six weeks of illness.
“He refused all painkillers to the end and left this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his feet,” Carlson wrote in his obituary, including details of his father’s difficult childhood.
Richard Carlson was born in 1941 to a 15-year-old girl who spoke only Swedish and tried to hide the pregnancy. He developed rickets because of malnutrition and was left at a Boston orphanage, and after years in foster homes, was placed with the Carlson family in Massachusetts. His adoptive father died when he was 12, and after a troubled teenhood, he served in the Marines and drove to California in search of adventure, where he found his calling in journalism.
“Over the next decade, he was a copy boy at the LA Times, a wire service reporter for UPI and an investigative reporter and anchor for ABC News, covering the upheaval of the period,” Tucker Carlson wrote. “He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time, including Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, Eric Hoffer, Jerry Garcia, as well as Mafia leaders and members of the Manson Family. In 1965, he was badly injured reporting from the Watts riots in Los Angeles.”
In 1975, Richard Carlson was married with two small boys “when his wife departed for Europe and didn’t return,” wrote Tucker Carlson, who has said that she wanted to pursue a “bohemian lifestyle.” His father “threw himself into raising his boys, whom he often brought with him on reporting trips” and educated them at the dinner table “on topics that ranged from the French Revolution to Bolshevik Russia, PG Wodehouse, the history of the American Indian and, always, the eternal and unchanging nature of people.”
As a reporter and anchor at KABC-TV in Los Angeles, Carlson won several awards, including a Peabody in 1971 for a story about car promotion fraud. He later became the longest-serving director of Voice of America, the federal government’s nonmilitary broadcasting arm, under the Reagan Administration.
He left in 1991, when President George H.W. Bush nominated him as U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, and served less than a year before becoming CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private but publicly-funded facilitator of content for public airwaves, where he remained five years.
In 1997, Carlson became president and CEO of King World Public Television, a subsidiary of “Oprah” syndicator King World Productions, in 1997, until it was sold to CBS in 1999.
All the while, Carlson had a foot in politics, with close ties to the White House, and was involved in negotiations on behalf of the U.S. government with many foreign countries, including China, Korea, the USSR, Germany and Israel. He lost a San Diego mayoral race and has testified dozens of times before various U.S. Congressional committees on a broad range of topics.
“The last 25 years of his life were spent in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting,” Tucker Carlson wrote. “He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues. He knew a number of colorful national leaders, including Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, Aslan Abashidze of Adjara, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and whomever runs Somaliland.”
He married Patricia Swanson, heir to the Swanson Foods fortune, in 1979.
“They were together for 44 years, all of them happy,” Tucker Carlson wrote. “She died sixteen months before he did and he mourned her every day.”
Richard Carlson is survived by his sons, Tucker and Buckley, his daughter-in-law Susie, and five grandchildren.
“He was the toughest human being anyone in his family ever knew, and also the kindest and most loyal,” Tucker Carlson concluded. “RIP.”
The post Dick Carlson, Award-Winning Journalist, Political Whisperer and Father of Tucker Carlson, Dies at 84 appeared first on TheWrap.
