Tucker Carlson has announced the passing of his father, Richard “Dick” Warner Carlson, at the age of 84. In an emotional post on X, the conservative commentator revealed that his father died on Monday, March 24, 2025, at his home in Boca Grande, Florida, following a six-week 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 a touching tribute.
Dick Carlson’s career spanned journalism, government, and—according to his own family—some enigmatic work in his later years. Before serving as the U.S. ambassador to Seychelles under President George H.W. Bush, he was appointed director of Voice of America by President Ronald Reagan. He also worked as a reporter, covering stories that often took him into the heart of unpredictable situations. Yet, even with an impressive résumé, some aspects of his work remained shrouded in mystery. According to an obituary shared by his son, “He spent the last 25 years of his life in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting.”
Beyond his public career, Dick Carlson was a devoted father with a knack for making life an adventure. He spoke to his sons daily and maintained a longstanding tradition of weekly lunches with them at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, always preceded by a dice game. “Throughout his life, he fervently loved dogs,” his obituary noted—a simple but defining trait of the man he was. He is survived by his two sons and five grandchildren.
Tucker Carlson has often credited his father with shaping his worldview, but his childhood was far from typical. Raised in Southern California by a journalist father and an heiress stepmother, he was exposed to a world that blurred the lines between politics, media, and the unexpected. A biography by Chadwick Moore, Tucker, recounts how Dick Carlson believed in throwing his children into real-life experiences, however unusual they may have seemed. “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 book states.
One particularly memorable episode? When Tucker and his younger brother, Buckley, were just five and six years old, their father brought them to a dinner hosted by Eddie Cannizzaro—a notorious mobster and prime suspect in a 1947 Beverly Hills mafia hit. Instead of shielding his children from the darker corners of life, Dick let them experience it firsthand. The mobster and his father, Joe, even led the boys on a tour of their garden and taught them how to make pasta e fagioli.
Before building a life in La Jolla, California, and later Washington, D.C., Dick Carlson was married to Tucker’s mother, Lisa McNear Lombardi. Their marriage ended in a bitter divorce in 1976, with Dick winning full custody of their sons. Citing his ex-wife’s struggles with alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine abuse, he argued she was incapable of caring for the children. Lisa remained in Los Angeles and had limited contact with Tucker, seeing him for the last time when he was just six years old. She passed away from cancer in 2011, never reconnecting with her son.
Things eventually stabilized for the Carlson family. In the affluent coastal community of La Jolla, Dick married Patricia Swanson—heiress to the Swanson frozen food empire—and built a new life. Richard Carlson, who started his award-winning career as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Times, became a familiar presence to Los Angeles TV viewers as an investigative reporter for KABC. He also worked at KGO in San Francisco and KFMB in San Diego.
While at KABC, Carlson aggressively reported on the fall of G. Elizabeth Carmichael, a transgender woman who developed a three-wheeled electric car when the country was dealing with skyrocketing gas prices. Carmichael never produced the car and was convicted for defrauding investors. Carlson, whose reporting revealed that Carmichael was transgender, was featured prominently in a 2021 HBO documentary about the entrepreneur, The Lady and the Dale. Carlson remained unrepentant about outing Carmichael, telling her documentarians, “If Liz’s behavior is normal, then so too is Jeffrey Dahmer’s.”
While working at KFMB, he outed transgender professional tennis player Renée Richards after she won a women’s singles division title in a La Jolla tournament. Carlson left journalism shortly after the Richards story, saying he was disillusioned by the global sensation it generated. “There are so many interesting things I think are important and interesting, but the media can be counted on to do handstands over that kind of scandal and sexual sensation,” he told The Times in 1984.
Richard Carlson was born on February 10, 1941. His mother was a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl who placed him in an orphanage in Boston. After years in foster homes, Carlson was adopted by a family in Norwood, Mass. Carlson’s adoptive father, a tannery manager, died when he was 12. He became a juvenile delinquent, arrested and jailed at 17 for car theft. He eventually enlisted in the Marine Corps and was a merchant seaman before pursuing a career in journalism, according to Tucker Carlson’s post.
After his military service, Richard Carlson joined The Times, where he became friends with Carl Brisson, the son of actress Rosalind Russell. They formed a journalistic partnership that included a Look magazine report that linked former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto to organized crime, ending his political career. Alioto called the article “character assassination for political purposes” and eventually won a $350,000 libel award. Carlson was not named as a defendant in the case.
In 1971, Carlson moved to TV station KABC, where he earned a Peabody Award for an investigative report on car promotion fraud. He moved to KFMB as a reporter and anchor in 1975. Carlson’s first wife left him in 1975, leaving him as a single father to raise Tucker and his brother, Buckley. He remarried in 1979 to Patricia Swanson, the heiress to the frozen-food company, who died in 2023.
After leaving television, Carlson joined Great American Federal, a San Diego-based savings and loan. He toyed with a career in politics, making an unsuccessful bid to become mayor of San Diego in 1984 against incumbent Roger Hedgecock, who was under indictment for perjury at the time. In 1985, Carlson moved to Washington to work for the Reagan administration. He spent five years as the director of the Voice of America, and then moved to the Seychelles as the U.S. ambassador. In 1992, he became the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides federal funding to public media. In 1997, Carlson joined King World, the syndication company that distributed “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune” before it was sold to CBS in 1999. He later served as vice chairman for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based neoconservative think tank.
Richard Carlson is survived by his two sons, Tucker and Buckley, and five grandchildren. His life, marked by a blend of personal challenges and professional triumphs, leaves a legacy that continues to shape the lives of those who knew him.
