Tucker Carlson has lost his father, Richard “Dick” Warner Carlson. Tucker Carlson called his dad “the toughest person in the world.”
On X, the conservative voice broke the sad news that his father had died on Monday at their home in Boca Grande, Florida, after being sick for six weeks.
Passed away holding the hands of his children
Not only was Dick Carlson the father of Tucker Carlson, but he was also a well-known and respected award-winning figure with a long and successful career.
Just like his son, Dick Carlson started out as a reporter before moving up in right governments. His first job was as Director of Voice of America under President Ronald Reagan, and before that he was the U.S. Ambassador to the Seychelles under President George H. W. Bush in the early 1990s.
A death notice that Carlson shared said that his father worked for the last 25 years of his life on something that “was never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting.”
Even though his work life was a mystery, he stayed close to his boys. For thirty years, he had lunch with them once a week at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., and they always started the meal with a dice game.
”Throughout his life, he fervently loved dogs,” the obituary added. After a six-week illness, Dick Carlson ”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.
Placed in a Boston orphanage
Richard Carlson was born on February 10, 1941, to a Swedish-speaking mother who was 15 years old and found him a home for little kids in Boston. He was adopted by a family in Norwood, Massachusetts, after living in foster homes for many years.
Carlson lost his adoptive father, a tannery manager, when he was 12 years old. This set him on a rough road. He was caught and jailed for car theft when he was 17. He did change his life, though. He joined the Marine Corps, worked as a merchant seaman, and finally became a journalist, as his son Tucker Carlson told us.
Dick Carlson started his impressive career as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Times. He then rose to fame as an investigative reporter for KABC, where he became known to TV fans in Los Angeles.
Tucker Carlson grew up in Southern California, but his life was not like most kids’. He was spoiled. Tucker was raised by his journalist father and his wife. It wasn’t a typical family, but it was still very nice.
Took his children to a murder scene
He has talked a lot about how his relationship with his dad shaped him. Chadwick Moore’s biography Tucker talks about how Dick was determined to show his kids the grim facts of his work from a very young age. Carlson was known as an involved dad with a clear idea of how to raise his boys.
He once said, ”I want them to be self-disciplined to the degree that I think is necessary to find satisfaction…you measure a person on how far they go, on how far they’ve sprung. My parents, the Carlsons, they instilled a modesty in me that, at times, gets in my way…I know it’s immodest of me to say it, but it’s difficult sometimes when you want to beat your own drum and say what you really think.”
One shocking example is when he took his kids to a murder scene and let them see the body of the victim lying on the ground.
The biography reveals, “As soon as they could walk, he dragged them along to dinners, restaurants, work events, and reporting gigs to ensure, as he says, that they ‘became well-informed and early gourmands.’”
The late Dick Carlson had two sons and five grandsons. He lived to be 84 years old.