Most of us probably comfortably sat at home that night, watching the events unfold on TV. Very few people knew what really happened, as this event in America was spinned and twisted into the usual "hate-China" propaganda for mass comsumption.
However, our media made up for it recently. PBS aired a documentary titled The Tank Man.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/The Frontline segment presented the Chinese government's casualty figure of 250 dead. I don't know if you ever researched this, but this figure is actually in-line with our NSA estimate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
The PBS documentary also dispelled the myth that students were "massacred" on TAM square grounds. If you haven't seen this you should. The documentary interviewed Journalists who were on the ground, as well as footages of thousands of students leaving the TAM square.
Actually, I have read this from another source years ago, from Columbia Univ. School of Journalism:
http://archives.cjr.org/year/98/5/tiananmen.asp
"as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.
A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.
Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances."
[Just for reference, throwing molotov cocktail at riot police is a crime in US.]
And Jay Mathews’ intention is clear:
“Journalists have to be precise about where it happened and who were its victims, or readers and viewers will never be able to understand what it meant.”