He returned to Beijing in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations. The point of his piece was that nine years after the fact, the story of the slaughter gets worse as it goes along. He quotes you as having noted on the May 31 edition of Meet the Press that there were 'tens of thousands' of deaths on the Square that day, when in fact there is no evidence that anyone died on the Square that day. Hundreds of people, most of them workers, and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances. The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities.
Western estimates are somewhat higher.
About two hundred soldiers are also missing. No one was killed within Tiananmen Square itself. Alas, neither Mr. Russert or any other journalist in the major media made an attempt to correct the record. That is an understandable, and emotionally satisfying, reaction. This was the larger story that most of us overlooked or underplayed.