Dick Carlson, who led Voice of America at Cold War’s end, dies at 84

He later served as ambassador to the Indian Ocean nation the Seychelles and headed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps support PBS, NPR, and other media outlets. Some GOP lawmakers have long denounced the agency for its cost to taxpayers and perceived left-leaning bias. During his tenure, Mr. Carlson stood against his own party in opposing any cutbacks in funding.

Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the US Agency for Global Media, which includes VOA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and Radio Free Asia. VOA journalists and its current director, Michael Abramowitz, are part of a lawsuit challenging the directive.

Mr. Carlson did not comment publicly on Trump’s efforts to shutter VOA. He also was reticent to offer extensive personal views on the career of his son, a former Fox News host who often displayed strong support for Trump and his policies. (A leaked text message from 2021, however, purportedly includes Tucker Carlson declaring, “I hate [Trump] passionately.”)

Mr. Carlson first entered the Washington political orbit in the Reagan era after a life of ceaseless reinvention. He was a high school dropout who joined the military, who then became a print reporter, who then went to sea on a merchant freighter, who then came back to journalism with television exposés that included Peabody Award-winning coverage of an auto industry scam.

After that came a stint in banking and an unsuccessful bid in 1984 to become mayor of San Diego. “I really became the director of the Voice of America by a fluke,” he said in a 1998 oral history with the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. “I would love to say that they recognized my basic good judgment, but that isn’t the case.”

Mr. Carlson was a spokesman for the US Information Agency when he was recommended for the VOA post by a California GOP ally. Mr. Carlson ended up being vetted at a lunch that included the co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, Edwin J. Feulner Jr., and lawyer Roy Cohn, who had advised Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, during the notorious “Red Scare” anticommunist inquests in the 1950s.

Mr. Carlson fit well into Ronald Reagan’s Cold War-fighting mentality. Mr. Carlson also proclaimed himself a stalwart defender of the VOA’s mission since World War II to bring straightforward coverage of world affairs and US foreign policy in dozens of languages to listeners in countries where outside media is censored or blocked.

After leaving the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1997, Mr. Carlson served as chief executive at King World Public Television, a subsidiary of King World Productions that syndicated “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Jeopardy!” and other shows. He left after CBS acquired King World in 1999. Mr. Carlson later was vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank specializing in security issues.

During a trip to Moscow in the late 1980s at a time of thawing relations under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr. Carlson met a young girl, Vera Zieman, who said she liked the cartoon cat Garfield because “he was free.” Mr. Carlson later helped arrange for Vera and her mother to immigrate to the United States. He met them on the steps of VOA headquarters in Washington.

He was born in Boston on Feb. 10, 1941, to teenage parents who named him Richard Boynton and sent him to an orphanage, The Home for Little Wanderers, when he was an infant.

Richard was adopted in 1943 by a couple from Norwood and given the name Richard Warner Carlson. His adopted father was a manager at a tannery, and his adopted mother was a nurse. The family moved to Rhode Island, settling in Providence after the elder Carlson’s death in 1954.

Mr. Carlson was expelled from high school for truancy and joined the Navy in 1959, training with the Marine Corps. “I was very active in juvenile delinquency,” he said. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, he attended the University of Mississippi through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).

He dropped out of the university, and left military service, in 1962 after campus riots broke out when the Kennedy administration brokered a deal for the school to admit its first Black student, James Meredith, an Air Force veteran. Mr. Carlson said he was dismayed by the racism in the South and remembered words of encouragement about his writing from a journalist he once met. “I had decided in effect that I would be a reporter,” he recalled.

He landed a news assistant job at the Los Angeles Times, where he met another aspiring journalist, Lance Brisson, the son of actress Rosalind Russell. Brisson and Mr. Carlson later reunited as a filmmaking and freelance television reporting team that provided stories to ABC News and others.

Brisson’s Hollywood contacts, meanwhile, introduced Mr. Carlson to a world of celebrities. He once flew to Las Vegas on a private jet with Frank Sinatra’s wife, actress Mia Farrow, to catch the singer’s gig at the Sands casino complex. (Mr. Carlson said he was given a cigarette case engraved with “Frank and Mia.”)

The rich and famous were, in turn, enthralled with Mr. Carlson’s tales of adventure, he said. As a reporter at United Press International in San Francisco in the early 1960s, he once got into a lunch-counter argument with a member of the seafarers’ union.

“I basically had said to him that I was under the impression that you couldn’t get into his union without paying a bribe,” he remembered. A few days later, Mr. Carlson received a call saying he had a spot as an ordinary seaman on a freighter called the Washington Bear. “I gave my notice at UPI,” he said.

He spent the next seven months in the Pacific, stopping at ports in Asia. He then returned to journalism.

“In a general sense, I felt qualified to be a storyteller,” Mr. Carlson said on “The Paul Leslie Hour” podcast in March 2024.

A 1969 story by Mr. Carlson and Brisson for Look magazine alleged links between San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto and organized crime figures. In 1977, a US District Court judge awarded Alioto a libel judgment of $350,000, plus legal costs, against Look, which had ceased publication in 1971. The ruling said Look editors overlooked flaws in the reporting. Mr. Carlson, who was not named as a defendant, stood by the story.

During the 1970s, Mr. Carlson worked in television journalism, including at KABC-TV in Los Angeles where he was named in a Peabody Award with producer Pete Noyes in 1975 on a story about a scammer, Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael, who claimed to be producing a new fuel-efficient car. Mr. Carlson, who revealed that Carmichael was transgender, was featured in a 2021 HBO documentary “The Lady and the Dale.”

At San Diego’s KFMB-TV, Mr. Carlson drew international attention when he questioned whether transgender tennis player Renée Richards should be playing female opponents. He said the intense fascination with Richards story led him to leave journalism.

“There are so many interesting 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,” he told the Los Angeles Times,

In 1977, Mr. Carlson took a position at San Diego Federal Savings and Loan Association (later Great American First Savings Bank), headed by Gordon Luce, a confidant of Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Carlson’s marriage to artist Lisa McNear ended in divorce. They had two sons, Tucker and Buckley, whom Mr. Carlson raised after the marriage ended. In 1979, Mr. Carlson married Patricia Caroline Swanson, an heiress to the Swanson frozen-food empire. She died in 2023. In addition to his two sons, he leaves five grandchildren.