Jfk, Brown Called Nixon ‘Nuts, Psycho’

President John F. Kennedy and former California Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown called Richard Nixon “nuts” and “psycho” in a taped telephone conversation after Brown’s victory over Nixon in the 1962 governor’s race, the San Francisco Examiner reported Sunday.

“You reduced him to the nut house,” said Kennedy, after Nixon’s infamous “last news conference” soon after his 300,000-vote loss to Brown.

After the defeat, Nixon bitterly told reporters: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

The conversation was included on tapes released last month by the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.

On the tapes, Brown also told the president that humiliating Nixon was what Kennedy had wanted. Kennedy defeated Nixon for the presidency in 1960.

“This is a very peculiar fellow. This is a very peculiar man,” Brown said. “I really think that he is psycho. He’s an able man, but he’s nuts!”