Dick Carlson
Richard Warner "Dick" Carlson (born 1941) is an American journalist, radio and television host, former diplomat, and media executive. He was director of the Voice of America during the last six years of the Cold War appointed by President Reagan and reappointed by President George H. W. Bush. During the same time, Carlson led Radio Marti to Cuba, and was director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), WORLDNET and the USIA Documentary Film Service.
In 1991-92, he was U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, an archipelago of more than 100 islands in the Indian Ocean, off the east coast of Africa, appointed by President George H.W. Bush. He returned to the U.S., at the request of the White House, to become president and ceo of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the parent company to PBS and National Public Radio, a position he held for six years.[1]
In 1997, he became president and ceo of King World Public Television, a subsidiary of King World Productions, the syndicator of Oprah, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, among other successful TV shows. Two years later, King World was purchased by CBS for $2.5 billion.
Carlson was the full-time Vice-Chairman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the counter terrorism institute in Washington, D.C. and Brussels, for eight years.[2]
Carlson has been chairman of the board of directors of InterMedia of Washington, D.C., the international research firm, for the past seven years. He has hosted the weekly Danger Zone radio shows on Sirius/XM, WMAL-630AM in Washington, British Sky Radio and the World Radio Network in London, for ten years. In 2012-2013, he hosted the weekly Danger Zone TV shows on FIOS and Time-Warner cable. LtCol. Bill Cowan, USMC (ret.) of Fox News has been his co-host on these shows and is his business partner in Tulip Hill Enterprises, LLC, which owns the broadcasts.
Carlson also writes a weekly newspaper column, often about terrorism and national security, for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review[3] and the Charleston Mercury.[4] He is a former political columnist for the Hill newspaper in Washington, D.C. (The Shadow Knows –by Dick Carlson & Bill Regardie.)
Carlson has been a newspaper and wire service reporter, a magazine writer, a TV and radio correspondent, and a documentary filmmaker. He has written hundreds of by-lined newspaper and magazine stories and has won more than a dozen prestigious media awards.
He co-wrote Snatching Hillary, A Satirical Novel (Tulip Hill Publishing, 2014, ISBN 0692337008) with Bill Cowan.
Work Life
Carlson began his career in journalism as an editorial assistant at the Los Angeles Times in December 1962, working primarily as a copy boy for the night city editor, Glenn Binford. He also worked, on his two days off, for the Hearst movie columnist Louella Parsons in her Beverly Hills office, and two mornings a week for UPI’s Foreign Film Bureau, off the LA Times newsroom, writing fan magazine stories under the legendary editor Henry Gris, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awards the Golden Globes.
Carlson was hired as a full-time UPI general assignment reporter in the fall of 1963. He worked from the San Francisco Bureau on Mission Street, and later wrote a daily column for UPI at the Capital Bureau in Sacramento. He was the night bureau chief for UPI in December, 1963, when he covered the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr, from Lake Tahoe in Nevada.
In part of 1964-65, Carlson left UPI to sail as an Ordinary Seaman on a tramp freighter (the SS Washington Bear of the Pacific Far East Line) to Southeast Asia, to Vietnam, Thailand and ports around the South China Sea. For four years, Carlson was a member of the Seaman’s Union of the Pacific and holds a U.S. Coast Guard Merchant Mariner’s card.
For eleven years, Carlson was a successful magazine writer (Time and Look) and an ABC-TV news correspondent in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He covered crime for four years at KGO-TV, with Lance Brisson. On special assignment for ABC-News, Carlson and Brisson covered the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, the Hunter’s Point Riots in San Francisco, the Draft Riots in Oakland, the Free Speech demonstrations in Berkeley and the San Francisco State College Riots, in which Carlson was injured. He won four Golden Mike Awards and the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award.
To assist his reportage of legal and crime coverage, Carlson read law under his friend the famed criminal attorney Jake Ehrlich in San Francisco, author of Ehrlich’s Blackstone, Ehrlich’s Criminal Law, Ehrlich’s Evidence, etc. Carlson has an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the California Western School of Law in San Diego.
Carlson produced and wrote four documentary films for TV; “The Streetwalkers” for ABC (with Lance Brisson”) “Hobo’s in America” for ABC (with Lance Brisson) “Dogs Run Free –Pounds of Sadness" for ABC, with music by Bob Dylan, and “Hello Again –with Rod McKuen" for NBC. (For the Hobo documentary Carlson and Brisson rode freight trains around the U.S., filming in hobo jungles and homeless shelters. The film was broadcast as a six-part series on the ABC-TV owned stations in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit and New York in 1966.)
Carlson headed ABC’s West Coast Investigative Unit at KABC-TV in Los Angeles for three years, an effort resulting in dozens of “enterprise” long-form news features on political and civic corruption. He was also political editor for ABC-News on the West Coast. He was host of the weekly KABC-TV show’ Head On” for three years, and was later, lead news anchor of the CBS station KFMB-TV in San Diego, where he did a daily 90 minute early evening newscast and also anchored the 11pm news before he left the TV news business.
He was a frequent panelist on the ABC network show “Issues & Answers”. He was also host of the weekly documentary program, “Dick Carlson’s California”. He was host of 130 half hour episodes of the nationally syndicated TV show “Coping.” Approximately forty of the segments were with Dr., Laura Schlesinger as co-host. He has been a member of AFTRA since 1964.
Carlson collects old US paper money, antique working duck decoys and walking sticks. His collection of walking sticks numbers more than 2,000, including canes belonging to Winston Churchill, John Wilkes Booth, W.C Fields, George Washington and others.
Carlson ran for Mayor of San Diego in 1983. He was one of two top vote getters in the primary and lost to the incumbent, Roger Hedgecock, in November, 1983.
Carlson has been a consultant to Communications Management, Inc., of Beverly Hills, Calif., where he has participated regularly in seminars in crisis management for top-level officials of industry. His students included the CEO’s of many Fortune 500 companies, including Flying Tiger Airlines, Southern Pacific Railroad, Hewlett Packard, Detroit Edison, Pacific Telephone, Dart Industries, Lockheed Missiles and Space, Union Chemical, Westinghouse Broadcasting and AT&T.
Carlson has spoken to more than 2000 clubs, civic groups and charitable groups. His topics have included "Crisis and the Media," “Adversarial & Investigative Reporting & How to Survive It,” The Art of Interrogation" and other subjects relating to journalism, TV and radio broadcasting and foreign policy and national security. He has been a repeat guest on Face the Nation, Nightline, Fox Morning News, Good Morning America, Today, the CBS Morning News, the NBC Evening News, John McLaughlin’s One on One, C-Span with Brian Lamb, and has been frequently quoted by national publications like the Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time and the NY Times.
Carlson has lectured to classes and groups at Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, the University of California, The Institute for International Relations in Moscow, Texas A&M, and other colleges and universities. He has been a frequent panelist in public forums and was host of the Mandeville Lecture Series at the University of California, San Diego. He has also lectured at the FBI Academy, CIA, National Security Agency and at the National War College in Washington, D.C.
Over the years, Carlson has contributed hundreds of by-lined articles to magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Boston Globe, The Sacramento Bee, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald, Policy Review, The American Spectator, Reader's Digest, Look Magazine, San Diego Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, Journal of Defense and Diplomacy and Diplomatic Digest and The Weekly Standard. His speeches have appeared in Vital Speeches magazine. For two years, he was a stringer for Time magazine. He is the author of the books, “Women in San Diego's History” (1977) “Free and Fair: The Last Two Weeks of Apartheid” (1995) and “Why Dogs Talk on Christmas Eve.” (2014)
For four years during the Cold War, Carlson was a member of the U.S. delegation to the annual US-USSR Information Talks in Moscow and Washington, D.C. During the same period, he led official U.S. government delegations to the People's Republic of China, to Georgia, USSR, and to Moldavia, USSR. He was a UN and International Federation of Electoral Systems (IFES) election observer for two weeks in the South African election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, assigned to polling places in Soweto and a labor camp in Swaneville, Krugerdorp.
In 1996, he was an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observer at the Parliamentary elections in Albania, assigned to an area down by the Greek border. Because of the lawlessness of the region, he traveled with a company of Romanian soldiers and a squad of Italian Special Forces. In 2009 he was an observer with OSCE in Romania at the presidential election, assigned to polls in Bucharest and the Gypsy (Roma) borough of Ferentari.
Carlson has addressed both the Israeli Knesset (jointly with Malcolm Forbes, Jr. in 1990) and the British House of Commons (with Richard Branson of Virgin, Inc. in July 1993-at the Rules Committee hearings). He has appeared dozens of times before various U.S. Congressional committees, including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Relations Committee. He was confirmed three separate times in hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Carlson has been a consultant on many sensitive projects involving investigative journalism and has lectured extensively on the subject of adversarial journalism. As a contract consultant, he completed a crisis management project for the Inter-American Development Bank, active in 46 countries.
For seven years, prior to his appointment to the Voice of America by President Reagan. Carlson was a successful mortgage banker. Carlson was one of three senior vice presidents of Great American First, a federal savings bank headquartered in San Diego, with170 branches in California, 2,800 employees and $14 billion in assets.
Carlson is a civilian sport parachutist. He is also a PADI-certified open-water SCUBA diver. Carlson was appointed a commissioned officer in the California Military Reserve in January, 1982, and served in the 40th Infantry Division with the rank of Colonel. In 1988, Carlson was selected by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, as one of four team captains for the week-long classified “Cincs” war-game, "Potent Archer” in Pensacola, Florida.
Journalism and Civic Awards
San Francisco State College Broadcasting Award, Best Documentary Film (1967)
Associated Press TV and Radio Award for Investigative reporting (1968)
Associated Press Radio Award for News Analysis (1968)
National Headliners Award, Hunter's Point Riot Coverage (1968)
Associated Press TV and Radio Award for News Analysis (1969)
"Golden Mike" Award, Best Documentary (1972)
Hollywood "Emmy" Award, Best Documentary (1972)
"Golden Mike" Award, Investigative Reporting (1975)
"Golden Mike" Award, Best Documentary (1975)
Associated Press TV and Radio Award for Analysis and Commentary (1975)
Associated Press TV and Radio” Award for Investigative Reporting (1976)
Hollywood "Emmy" Award, Best Special, “Hello, Again - with Rod McKuen” (1976)
Los Angeles Press Club "Grand" Award, Investigative Reporting (1976)
San Diego Press Club Award, Investigative Reporting (1976)
George Foster Peabody Award, Investigative Reporting (for ABC-TV) (1976)
Associated Press TV and Radio Award for Investigative reporting (1977)
Hollywood "Emmy" Award, Best Investigative Reporting (1977)
San Diego Press Club Award, Best Documentary (1977)
“American Broadcast Pioneer” Award, The Broadcaster’s Foundation (1997)
Certificate of Appreciation, Military Order of World Wars (1977)
Award of Merit, San Diego Historical Society(For Authorship of Women in San Diego's History) (1977)
Award of Appreciation, La Jolla Chamber Music Society (1979)
Special Services Award, County of San Diego (1979)
"Silver Triangle" Award, San Diego YMCA (1981)
"Amigo de Distinction," Mexican-American Foundation (1981)
"Jose Marti Award," Cuban-American Political Association (1988)
"Friend of Lithuania" Award, Knights of Lithuania (1988)
Honorary Doctor of Laws, California Western School of Law (1988)
"Demosthenes Award," American Hellenic Educational Association (1990)
"Humanitarian of the Year," International Medical Corps (Afghanistan) (1990)
Family
Carlson is married to the former Patricia Caroline Swanson of Omaha. They live in Chevy Chase, Maryland and in a small Virginia town on the Chesapeake Bay. They have a family summer home in Maine on an island. They are the parents of three adult children, Tucker, Buckley and Bo (Mrs. Frank Hatch.) Dick and Patricia Carlson are the grandparents of seven children: Lillie, Buckley, Hope, Dorothy and Charles Carlson, and Holly and George Hatch.
Mrs. Carlson is a Trustee Emeritus of La Jolla Country Day School and was formerly active in the Junior League. She has been a director of the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, a director of the San Diego Museum of Art, a director of the Rosalind Russell Arthritis Foundation, a governor of Scripps Memorial Hospital, a trustee of the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation, president of the Board of Directors of the Friends of the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation, and a fundraiser for a number of civic and charitable organizations.
Mrs. Carlson has worked as a volunteer in a number of national political campaigns and as a volunteer at the White House in the office of the President for 21 years, and at the residence of the Vice President, two days a week for two years.
References
- ↑ "Ambassador Carlson Chosen as CPB President". apnewsarchive.com. March 26, 1992.
- ↑ "Richard Carlson joins FDD". Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 1 April 2003.
- ↑ Richard W. Carlson (27 September 2014). "Obama's Bowe Bergdahl powder keg". TribLIVE.com.
- ↑ Richard W. Carlson. "Danger Zone: Analysis from Bill Cowan of Fox News". Charleston Mercury.