Right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, who served as a long time host on Fox before launching his own media ventures, shared on X that his father, whom he considered “the toughest person in the world,” passed away.
Richard “Dick” Warner Carlson died in his home in Boca Grande, Florida, surrounded by his children.
Just like his son, Dick worked as a reporter at the start of his career, before serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the Seychelles under President George H. W. Bush in the early 1990s. Before that, he worked as Director of Voice of America under President Ronald Reagan.
In his tribute to his father, Tucker wrote, “Throughout his life, he fervently loved dogs” and 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.”
Born on Feb. 10, 1941 in Massachusetts, to a Swedish-speaking mother who was 15, Dick was left in an orphanage is Boston. He spend his childhood years moving from one foster family to another before being adopted. At 17, he was thrown out of school and joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
“He was a free thinker and a compulsive book reader, including at red lights,” Tucker said of his father.
“He left a library of thousands of books, most dog-eared and filled with marginalia. His reading and life experiences convinced him that God is real. He had an outlaw spirit tempered by decency.”
Throughout his life, he worked in different countries, meeting various world leaders.
“He was a fundamentally nonjudgmental person who was impossible to shock, and he described them all with amused affection,” Tucker added about his father.
Dick Carlson was a singe father who raised his sons on his own after his wife departed for Europe and didn’t return, dreaming of leading a bohemian lifestyle, according to Tucker.
Dick often took his boys to 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.”
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 “Dick” Warner Carlson is survived by his two sons, his five grandchildren, and his daughter-in-law.
May he rest in peace.
