I’m not rich but I paid my house off. And at that point, I was like, “You know, I don’t give a shit. I’m just going to say what I think.” And I mean it.
Uhm:
Carlson was born Tucker McNear Carlson in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, on May 16, 1969. He is the elder son of artist and San Francisco native Lisa McNear (née Lombardi) (1945–2011) and Dick Carlson (1941–), a former “gonzo reporter” who became the director of the Voice of America, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles.Carlson’s brother, Buckley Peck Carlson, later Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson, is nearly two years younger and has worked as a communications manager and Republican political operative.
When Carlson was in first grade, his father moved Tucker and his brother to the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, and raised them there. Carlson attended La Jolla Country Day School and grew up in a home overlooking the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. His father owned property in Nevada, Vermont, and islands in Maine and Nova Scotia. In 1984, his father unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Republican Mayor Roger Hedgecock in the San Diego mayoral race.
In 1979, Carlson’s father married divorcée Patricia Caroline Swanson, an heiress to Swanson Enterprises, daughter of Gilbert Carl Swanson, and niece of Senator J. William Fulbright. Though Patricia remained a beneficiary of the family fortune, the Swansons had sold the brand to the Campbell Soup Company in 1955 and did not own it by the time of Carlson’s father’s marriage.
Carlson was briefly enrolled at Collège du Léman, a boarding school in Switzerland, but says he was “kicked out”. He attained his secondary education at St. George’s School, a boarding school in Middletown, Rhode Island, where he started dating his future wife, Susan Andrews, the headmaster’s daughter. He then went to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, graduating in 1991 with a BA in history.