I would like to muddy the waters a little more by proposing Richard Milhous Nixon for consideration as a tyrant. Hiding behind his successful foreign policy negotiations with China and the Soviet Union, his environmental policies, his stance on women's rights, and desegregation of public schools that occurred under his time in office, Nixon was able to engage in mass murder in South East Asia, defile the civil rights of anyone involved in the Peace Movement in the U.S. and just be an all around jerk with his anti-Semitism.