In a very poignant and tragic post on X, former Fox News Channel star and current podcast host Tucker Carlson informed his fans of a tragic loss in his family, announcing that his father had passed away on Monday, March 24 at the age of 84. In that heartwrenching post, Tucker also asked for privacy and told his fans he would be back as soon as he could, while adding a few details about his father’s passing.
Tucker’s father, as background, was named Richard Warner Carlson. He raised Tucker after Tucker’s mother, his wife, left them when Tucker and his brother was just young boys. He was a highly successful investigative reporter in California who turned into a television and public broadcasting executive later in life.
Beginning his post, which he titled “Obituary for my father,” Tucker commented on how his father remained a tough fighter to the end, saying, “Richard Warner Carlson died at 84 on March 24, 2025 at home in Boca Grande, Florida after six weeks of 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.”
Continuing, Tucker described his father’s hardscrabble early life and how he got his life on track after teen years filled with criminality and hardship by joining the Marines, saying, “He was born February 10, 1941 at Massachusetts General Hospital to a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl and placed in the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston, where he developed rickets from malnutrition. His legs were bent for the rest of his life. After years in foster homes, he was placed with the Carlson family in Norwood, Mass. His adoptive father, a tannery manager, died when he was 12 and he stopped attending school regularly. At 17, he was jailed for car theft, thrown out of high school for the second time, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.”
Then, explaining how his beloved father got to California and ended up as a reporter, Tucker wrote, “In 1962, in search of adventure, he drove to California. He spent a year as a merchant seaman on the SS Washington Bear, transporting cargo to ports in the Orient, and then became a reporter. Over the next decade, he was a copy boy at the LA Times, a wire service reporter for UPI and an investigative reporter and anchor for ABC News, covering the upheaval of the period. He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time, including Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, Eric Hoffer, Jerry Garcia, as well as Mafia leaders and members of the Manson Family. In 1965, he was badly injured reporting from the Watts riots in Los Angeles.”
Building on that, Tucker described in detail how his father raised his two sons after their mother deserted them, saying, “By 1975, he was married with two small boys, when his wife departed for Europe and didn’t return. He threw himself into raising his boys, whom he often brought with him on reporting trips. At home, he educated them during three-hour dinners 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 was a free thinker and a compulsive book reader, including at red lights. 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.”
Noting how his dad found a better wife in his second marriage, and built himself into a successful executive, Tucker explained, “In 1979, he married the love of his life, Patricia Swanson. They were together for 44 years, all of them happy. She died sixteen months before he did and he mourned her every day. In 1985, he 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 US ambassador. In 1992, he became the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and later ran a division of King World television.”
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Then, noting how his father ended up working for the government and dealing with some notably crazy leaders in the “developing world,” Tucker said, “The last 25 years of his life were spent in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting. He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues. He knew a number of colorful national leaders, including Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, Aslan Abashidze of Adjara, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and whomever runs Somaliland. He was a fundamentally nonjudgmental person who was impossible to shock, and he described them all with amused affection.”
Concluding on a more personal note, Tucker wrote, “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. Richard W. Carlson is survived by his sons, Tucker and Buckley, his beloved 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. RIP.”