By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2025-03-26 15:47:04 | Updated at 2025-04-03 10:44:54
1 week ago
Tucker Carson has announced the death of his father Richard 'Dick' Warner Carlson at 84.
The conservative podcaster shared the news on an X post on Wednesday, saying Warner Carlson died on Monday at home in Boca Grande, Florida, after 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.
The elder Carlson served as the US ambassador to Seychelles under the George H. W. Bush administration in the early 1990s.
He had previously served under president Ronald Reagan as the director of Voice of America.
Dick Carlson had a career as a reporter before his time in conservative governments.
Tucker Carlson announced the death of his father on Wednesday
Richard 'Dick' Warner Carlson died at home in Florida after a six-week illness
Dick Carlson is survived by his two sons, Tucker and Buckley
According to an obituary shared by Carlson, his father spent the last 25 years of his life 'in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting.'
'He spoke to his sons every day and had lunch with them once a week for thirty years at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, always prefaced by a dice game. Throughout his life he fervently loved dogs,' his obituary added.
Dick Carlson is survived by his two sons and five grandchildren.
Tucker Carlson had an unconventional, if mostly upscale childhood in Southern California, where he was raised by his journalist father and heiress stepmother.
He has previously said his relationship with his father was formative in who he became.
A biography by Chadwick Moore titled Tucker said Dick believed in exposing his children to the excitement and grittiness of his work from early ages, including once bringing them along to a murder investigation and showing them the victim splattered on the sidewalk.
'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,'' reads the biography.
Dick Carlson and his second wife, American frozen dinner heiress Patricia Swanson. Following Carlson's mother's abandonment of the family, Dick moved his sons to San Diego, where he met and married Swanson, who later went on to legally adopt Carlson and his brother
Pictures from a family album of the Carlsons camping. Dick Carlson was a father who believed in submitting his sons to every life experience that was available
'Once when they were five and six, they went along for a Sunday dinner at the San Fernando Valley home of Eddie Cannizzaro, a notorious mobster and the prime suspect in a 1947 Beverly Hills mafia hit.'
The mobster and his father Joe led Tucker, and his younger brother Buckley, around the home's gardens and showed them how to make pasta e fagioli.
Carlson told the author that his father was 'a wonderful, committed' parent, but someone who nurtured fierce independence in his children by putting them in what may seem to some like uncomfortable situations.
Because Dick was the anchor of a local news station in San Diego, he was something of a local celebrity and often courted interesting and important dinner guests.
Prior to life in La Jolla, and eventually Washington, DC, Dick was married to the mother of his two children - Lisa McNear Lombardi.
In 1976, Dick Carlson filed for divorce and moved from Los Angeles to San Diego with his sons, of whom he won full custody, citing his soon-to-be ex-wife's 'alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine abuse' that 'left her incapable of properly caring' for the children.
Lisa stayed in Los Angeles and saw Tucker for the last time when he was six years old. According to the book, Carlson did not see her again before her death from cancer in 2011.
Things seemingly fell into a good place for the Carlsons once they were in San Diego. In the affluent seaside area of La Jolla, Dick Carlson met and married his neighbor from two doors down, Patricia Swanson - the heiress to the quintessential American frozen dinner company.
