Fox News' Tucker Carlson was never any good at school. The conservative firebrand only managed to get into Trinity College, in Hartford, after his boarding school's headmaster — the father of his then-girlfriend and now wife — pulled some strings on his behalf.

Today, Carlson is the host of the popular Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, which draws even more viewers than Megyn Kelly did when she previously held his 9 p.m. time slot. Despite being a household name for the right-leaning network, Carlson is technically a registered Democrat. He says it is so he can vote in D.C.'s predominately Democratic primaries.

But as The New Yorker reveals, it took Carlson many years — and a few stumbles, including a failed attempt to join the CIA — to get from Trinity to television screens across the country:

After college, [Carlson] tried and failed to persuade the CIA to employ him; the real-life agency, unlike its fictional counterparts, prefers not to hire young men who are gabby and insubordinate. Instead, he got a job in Little Rock, working for Paul Greenberg, the exacting editorial-page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. [The New Yorker]

Read more about Carlson, including his attempt to name his son "Flashman," at The New Yorker. Jeva Lange