Tucker Carlson’s father, veteran journalist Richard “Dick” Carlson, has died at 84.
The former Fox News anchor announced in an X post that his father died on Monday at home in Boca Grande, Florida after battling an illness for six weeks.
“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 an obituary on Wednesday.
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Dick was born in Massachusetts in February 1941 and was adopted by the Carlson family in Norwood years later.
He became a reporter in California in the 1960s, working as a copyboy at the Los Angeles Times, a reporter for the wire service United Press International, and an investigative journalist for ABC News.
Carlson fondly recalled how his father would bring him and his brother on reporting trips and spend hours-long dinners talking about everything from the French Revolution to the nature of man.
“He was a free thinker and a compulsive book reader, including at red lights,” Carlson said. “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. “
In 1979, Dick married frozen food heiress Patricia Swanson. They were together for four decades until she died in 2023.
Dick moved to Washington in 1985 to work for the Reagan administration, first as the director of the now-dismantled Voice of America, then as the U.S. ambassador to Seychelles, and finally as CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Carlson said his father spent the last 25 years of his life doing work “whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting.”
Dick worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics across the world, meeting a variety of world leaders.
“He was a fundamentally nonjudgmental person who was impossible to shock, and he described them all with amused affection,” the conservative commentator said of his father.
Dick is survived by his sons Tucker and Buckley, 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,” Carlson said. “RIP.”
