Tucker Carlson‘s Fathe, Dick Carlson
Richard Warner Carlson (born February 10, 1941) is an American journalist, diplomat, and lobbyist who served as the director of Voice of America during the Cold War’s final six years.
At the same time, he was the director of the United States Information Agency and the United States Information Agency Documentary Film Service.
Carlson has also worked as a reporter for newspapers and wire services, a magazine writer, a television and radio correspondent, and a documentary filmmaker. Tucker Carlson, the conservative television host, is his son.
Dick Carlson Age, Tucker Carlson’s Father Now
Richard Warner Carlson is 83 years old as of 2024. He was born on February 10, 1941, in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
He has been celebrating his birthday every year together with his family and friends.
| Year | 2024 | 2025 |
| Dick Carlson Age | 83 years | 84 years |
Dick Carlson Family and Education
Carlson was the son of 18-year-old college student Richard Boynton and 15-year-old Dorothy Anderson. Anderson had starved herself to keep the pregnancy a secret, so he was born with rickets and mildly bent legs.
Richard Boynton attempted to persuade Dorothy to accompany him in stealing their baby and marrying him in 1943; when she refused, claiming that she was a junior in high school and that only her parents knew about the baby, he shot and killed himself two blocks from her home.
Carlson was given to The Home for Little Wanderers, a Boston orphanage, six weeks after his birth. “Home Wanted for Foundling” was the headline of a classified ad in the local papers about him. Florence Moberger, a Malden housewife, was the only one who responded.
Florence and Carl Moberger had three children but were unable to have more. Carl and Florence agreed to care for Carlson until he could be adopted by a family.
Carlson lived with the Mobergers for more than two years and claims to have formed a strong bond with them. Carlson claimed that many prospective parents came to see him during that time, including his birth mother, Anderson, who pretended to be her own sister.
Carlson was adopted by the Carlson family, a wool broker, and his wife in 1943. Carlson lost his adoptive father when he was twelve years old.
Carlson graduated from the Naval Academy Preparatory School and enrolled in an ROTC program at the University of Mississippi, working odd jobs in between classes. He was discharged from the army in 1962 and did not complete his education. After that, he relocated to Los Angeles.
Dick Carlson Wife and Children
Carlson married Lisa McNear (née Lombardi) in 1967. Tucker McNear Carlson (later Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson) was born in 1969, and Buckley Peck Carlson was born in 1970. (later, Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson). In 1976, Carlson and Lombardi divorced. Tucker and Buckley were given to Carlson as a gift. Tucker Carlson later claimed that his mother abandoned the family when he was six years old in order to live a “bohemian” lifestyle.
Carlson married Patricia Caroline Swanson, a divorced heiress to the Swanson frozen-food fortune, in 1979. Swanson is the niece of Senator J. William Fulbright and the daughter of Gilbert Carl Swanson. Swanson married for the third time after legally adopting Tucker Carlson and his brother.
Carlson was described as a hands-on father with a distinct approach to raising his sons.
“I want them to be self-disciplined to the degree that I think is necessary to find satisfaction. You measure a person by how far they go or by how far they’ve sprung. My parents, the Carlsons, 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 drum and say what you think.”
Carlson was manufacturing modular cabinets with Karon Luce, wife of savings and loan executive Gordon Luce, in 1984.
Carlson holds an honorary doctorate in law from San Diego’s California Western School of Law.
Carlson and his wife split their time between Chevy Chase, Maryland, and a small Chesapeake Bay town in Virginia. They own a summer home on a Maine island.
Dick Carlson Career
As an independent journalist
Carlson got a job as a “copy boy” for night city editor Glenn Binford at the Los Angeles Times when he was 22. There, he met Carl Lance Brisson, the son of actress Rosalind Russell, and became friends with him.
Carlson joined United Press International as a reporter in 1963. He wrote for Hearst movie columnist Louella Parsons in her Beverly Hills office on his two days off. He also contributed fan magazine stories to UPI’s Foreign Film Bureau and worked under the editorship of Henry Gris, the first president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Carlson and Brisson moved to San Francisco two years later to try to make a name for themselves as freelance independent television reporters, producing news features for local and national distribution. They were paid less than $100 per week until KGO-TV in San Francisco hired them full-time.
Carlson and Brisson are best known for a Look article linking Mayor Joseph Alioto to organized crime. Alioto went on to sue the magazine for $12 million in libel. The article was found to be “false and defamatory” and “made with actual malice and disregard for the truth” by a federal judge. Carlson and Brisson were not named as defendants in the trial due to legal complications.
Alioto was awarded $350,000 by the judge, and the legal fees contributed to Look’s demise. Carlson defended the story, claiming that several of their sources either refused to testify or died as a result of it.
As an investigative journalist
Carlson was hired by KABC-TV in Los Angeles in 1971. Carlson won several awards with producer Pete Noyes, including a Peabody Award for an exposé they produced about car promotion fraud.
In 1975, Noyes accepted a position as a news anchorman and investigative reporter at KFMB-TV in San Diego, and he asked Carlson to join him. Carlson, however, left the job after 18 months, describing it as a “kid’s game” laced with “a lot of arrogance and hypocrisy” and a “kid’s game” that was “insipid, sophomoric, and superficial.” He admitted to being a part of the hypocrisy by citing a piece he wrote in which a local tennis player, Dr. Renée Richards, was revealed to be a transsexual woman.
Carlson also went after G. Elizabeth Carmichael, outing her as transgender and refusing to refer to her as a woman when the judge presiding over the trial told him to. The HBO miniseries The Lady and the Dale popularized this story.
“There are so many other 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.”
As a banker
Carlson became the public affairs director of San Diego Federal Savings and Loan (later Great American First Savings), a savings and loan headed by Gordon Luce, a former cabinet member and close friend of Ronald Reagan. He rose through the ranks to vice president of finance in just three years.
Due to the bank’s political ties, Great American First Savings was embroiled in controversy. For example, in 1984, the bank was chastised for allowing Ronald Reagan’s adviser, Edwin Meese, to fall 15 months behind on his mortgage.
Bank officers were accused of receiving federal jobs in exchange for being pro-Meese in the same year. The loans to Meese, according to Luce, were a “natural evolution” of mixing business, politics, and friendship.
Mike Wallace of the investigative television show 60 Minutes interviewed Carlson in 1981 about the bank’s controversial home foreclosures, in which the bank was accused of duping low-income Californians. When the 60 Minutes cameras were not rolling during a commercial break, Carlson hired a camera crew to videotape the interview and caught Wallace making a racist joke about blacks and Hispanics:
“‘You bet your ass [the contracts are] hard to read’…if you’re reading them over watermelon or tacos.”
Carlson left Great America in early 1983 to pursue a career in politics after Wallace was forced to apologize.
Venture into politics: 1984 mayoral campaign
Carlson applied for a seat on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors in 1983.
Carlson decided to run for mayor of San Diego the following year, in a contentious campaign against incumbent Roger Hedgecock, who was facing perjury and conspiracy charges.
Throughout his campaign, Carlson was chastised for several transgressions. He was chastised, for example, for referring to his candidacy as a political strategy rather than a vision or plan for the city. He was chastised for being “long on platitudes and generalities, but short on details.” He was chastised for claiming that the city manager, not the mayor, was in charge of the city.
He was also chastised for promising not to spend his own money on the campaign but then spending nearly $225,000 of his own money, as well as for “gay-baiting” –– falsely claiming that Hedgecock was backed by the gay community in an attempt to turn voters against him. Carlson also had a comedian tell a series of racist jokes at one of his major fundraisers, for which he later apologized.
Carlson’s campaign was criticized for its ties to Great American First Savings, a firm with close ties to the White House.
Thirty employees each gave more than $4,000 to his campaign, whereas only one employee gave to Hedgecock’s.
Carlson began to skip candidate forums when pressed about the connection and other campaign issues, and members of the press found it increasingly difficult to reach him, with Carlson frequently not responding to the press for periods of two weeks at a time.
Carlson also lacked exposure because Hedgecock refused to debate him, referring to him as a “minor candidate.”
“There are two major questions in voters’ minds. The first is whether Roger Hedgecock has compromised the office of mayor sufficient to the point where people feel he should be turned out. The other is whether Dick Carlson is competent and qualified to be mayor. On November 6, I think the majority of people will answer ‘yes’ to both questions.” – Dick Carlson, Oct. 21, 1984
Carlson lost the election despite spending $1.2 million on the campaign and outspending Hedgecock by a 2:1 margin.
As VOA director
President Ronald Reagan announced Carlson’s nomination as an associate director of the United States Information Agency to succeed Ernest Eugene Pell in the summer of 1986.
Carlson was named director of Voice of America, a US government-funded, state-owned multimedia agency that serves as the federal government’s official non-military external broadcasting institution.
With a full-time staff of 3,000 and a part-time staff of 1,200, it broadcasts 24 hours a day in nearly 50 languages to more than 130 million people around the world.
In VOA’s 50-year history, Carlson was the longest-serving director.
As Ambassador to Seychelles
Carlson left Voice of America in June 1991 after President George H. W. Bush appointed him as the United States’ ambassador to the Seychelles.
As a CEO
Carlson was named CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in March 1992, a “private corporation funded by the American people” that produces and distributes public broadcasting programming.
During his presidency, the Republican Party began an official shift on public broadcasting by adding a platform plank condemning public broadcasting as “misguided,” “ridiculous,” and undeserving of government support. The official position of the party was that public media was liberally biased, and that privatization of the system was something “the party looked forward to.”
Republicans have been accused of weaponizing public broadcasting in order to use it as a campaign issue against candidates who support it, according to critics. Carlson was opposed to the platform shift:
“The Republicans are misinformed. They are putting the blame on the wrong outfit.”
Carlson stayed at CPB for five years.
At King World Public
He became president and CEO of King World Public Television in 1997, a subsidiary of King World Productions, the syndicator of Oprah, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy!, among other popular television shows, until the network was purchased by CBS for $2.5 billion in the summer of 1999.
At Foreign relations
Carlson has testified before a number of congressional committees in the United States, including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Relations Committee. He has also represented the United States in negotiations with a number of foreign governments, including China, Korea, the Soviet Union, Germany, Costa Rica, Belize, Liberia, Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, Morocco, and Israel.
Carlson and Malcolm Forbes, Jr. delivered a joint address to the Israeli Knesset in 1990. Three years later, he and Richard Branson delivered a joint speech to the House of Commons in the United Kingdom.
Carlson served as an international observer at South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
In 1997, he served as an international observer at Albania’s parliamentary elections, supervising polling stations in the lawless region near the Greek border.
Carlson joined the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a counter-terrorism institute based in Washington, D.C. and Brussels, Belgium, as vice-chairman in 2003. He was in charge for eight years.
He was also the president of InterMedia, a global research consulting firm that conducts opinion surveys for government agencies in over 75 countries, from 1992 to 1997. He is currently the Chairman of the Board.
Carlson served on the Institute for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence’s advisory board.
He has also been a member of the European Broadcasting Union and the Asian Broadcasting Union for a long time.
Carlson was said to be a director of Policy Impact, a lobbying firm, in 2021. The firm has lobbied the US on behalf of Hungary’s Viktor Orban government.
As an author
Bill Cowan and Carlson collaborated on Snatching Hillary, A Satirical Novel (Tulip Hill Publishing, 2014, ISBN 0692337008).
Women in San Diego’s History (1977), Free and Fair: The Last Two Weeks of Apartheid (1995), and Why Dogs Talk on Christmas Eve are among his works.
He writes a weekly newspaper column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the Charleston Mercury, often about terrorism and national security. He was a former political gossip columnist for The Hill newspaper in Washington, D.C., where he co-wrote “The Shadow Knows” with Bill Regardie.
Dick Carlson Net Worth, Richard Warner Carlson Net Worth
Richard Warner Carlson is estimated to have a net worth of $50 million at present. He has accumulated his net worth with the versatility he has shown in the various fields he has worked in. His main source of earnings is from his journalism career, his government appointments, executive roles, and book sales.
Where is Richard Warner Carlson now?
Dick Carlson Today, Carlson is retired as of 2022 and working on a new book. He does not hold any public office.