Inside this issue is a treasure trove of first-hand information about the candidates and the issues in the coming election. How do I know? Because we, the different members of the editorial board of Times Beacon Record Newspapers, personally interviewed 16 people running for office across the three towns that we serve: Brookhaven, Smithtown and Huntington. The offices the candidates are running for are all local, which means that these are the officials who will have the most direct effect on our lives. The positions range this year from county executive and county legislator to town supervisor and town council, to highway department supervisor and family court judge.

We asked them questions without bias, seeking only to understand who they were, what they believed and what we could expect from each of them, should they be elected — or re-elected, as the case might be. The setting in our conference room was relaxed, and we hoped comfortable, with opponents for each office seated together around the table responding to questions put to them by our editors and reporters.

Sometimes there were four candidates, sometimes only one who might be running unopposed or against a shadow opponent, but mostly there were two during each session. Most of the time, the hour goes by calmly, but occasionally the opponents get testy with each other — they may even become openly hostile.

At one such session some years ago, one of the candidates invited the other out to the back parking lot “to settle things.” When the other began to take off his jacket, we quickly intervened. But there was no such flare-up this year.

The answers were timed in an attempt to get to the main ideas without running on too long. There was ample time at the end for each visitor to tell us anything more that perhaps we hadn’t elicited with our questioning.

We have written up the details of each interview in a separate article for the election section. And we discuss the candidates at the end of each hour and come to a conclusion for the endorsement.

Most of the time, the editorial group was unanimous because the choices were fairly direct. But for a couple of races, we talked over the pros and cons of each candidate at length before making the selection. These endorsements are based on both the in-depth interviews and the considerable information we know about the incumbents since we have been covering them closely throughout their terms in office. Of course, after reading the stories, you may or may not agree with our conclusions. Our job is to get you thinking.

The many hours that are given to this task, throughout the month of October, are a service for our readers. We are privileged to enjoy an extended face-to-face time with those standing for election, and we feel an obligation to pass along whatever information, facts and impressions we gather during these sessions. We sincerely hope we help in the sometimes-difficult job of casting a responsible vote.

Each year we include in the election section a sample ballot that we are able to procure, with greater or lesser difficulty, from county election officials. This year the effort took most of an entire day until we got to the right person. It was finally our art director who located the prize. We believe it was well worth the trouble, because readers have told us that it is a great advantage for them to receive the ballot at the voting poll already knowing how it is laid out.

Our editorial board is made up of staffers with different political leanings, but when we put our journalists’ hats on, we try to judge each race strictly on the merits of the opposing candidates. And while it is technically possible for me to be tyrannical about the final selections, that is almost never the case. We decide by majority rule.

Sincere thanks to the talented staff who join in this extra work each year. We truly believe that we are watchdogs for the people, and nowhere is that more necessary than in reporting about government and its office holders. We hope we have helped you, whether you read by newspaper and/or online. Now please vote.

The Cold War is back in Steven Spielberg’s new film, “Bridge of Spies.” Starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance, the movie is based on a true story that I well remember for I am a child of the Cold War era during which the United States and the Soviet Union had been competing over who could amass the most lethal cache of nuclear weapons. I was 6 years old and in first grade when a movie company producing news segments that routinely preceded the featured film in theaters came to my school. This was before television. They filmed my class doing a “duck and cover” in which we pulled our raincoats over our heads and scrambled under our desktops. This action was to protect us from the effects of an atom bomb, should one be dropped on New York City by the Soviets, and the news short was shown in local theaters. I was the child in the front.

With my life as sort of bookends of that era, I crossed into East Berlin in 1989, six weeks before the Berlin Wall was torn down. I was visiting a friend whose husband was on sabbatical in West Berlin at the time, and she booked us on a bus that regularly took tourists to view the museums behind the Iron Curtain. It happened to be the weekend of the 40th anniversary of the East German state, called the German Democratic Republic, and Soviet Union general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was joining East German leader Erich Honecker for the celebrations. Stuck behind the Wall for security reasons, we witnessed torchlight parades through the streets from the bus for hours before we were able to return to the West. The woman in the seat ahead of us audibly thanked God and wanted to kiss the ground when we did.

It was an inside look at the crumbling buildings, the cameras, dogs, challenging border guards and tensions that existed in East Berlin, which my gut still recalls because it clenched at the sight and atmosphere realistically portrayed in East Berlin by Spielberg

I feel fortunate to have had that experience because we who so automatically enjoy all sorts of freedoms need to know what lacking them means to the citizenry of any country. People were killed trying to scale the Berlin Wall to escape, and “Bridge of Spies” recaptures that desperation even as it tells the story of how two Americans were freed.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was in his last months at the White House when Francis Gary Powers was flying his U-2 spy plane over Soviet Union airspace and was shot down. That was in 1960, when coincidentally a Soviet KGB spy known as Rudolf Abel was serving a prison term in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He had been nabbed by the FBI in what was termed the Hollow Nickel Case and was serving a 45-year sentence.

After Powers was captured the Soviets initiated a back-door effort to trade Powers for Abel, and the negotiator in that highly tense situation was, improbably, an insurance lawyer named James Donovan from Brooklyn, where Abel had lived and posed as an artist. It had to be someone without government ties, and Donovan was selected first to defend Abel in order to give him the right to a fair trial, according to the movie, and then to unofficially represent the United States in such an exchange.

With Cold War tensions high, Donovan was initially vilified for defending Abel, and death threats were made against him while his wife and children were threatened. But through a whole series of gutsy experiences, including giving up the coat off his back, Donovan was able to successfully trade Abel for two Americans: Powers and a Yale economics grad student who simply had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We who were alive then or have read about the U-2 incident know that the negotiations were ultimately successful. Powers and Abel were marched to the center of the Glienicke Bridge, which spans the narrows between West Berlin and Potsdam, and returned to the protection of their respective countries. The Yale grad student, Frederic Pryor, was simultaneously allowed to cross at Checkpoint Charlie. Yet even though the outcome is never in doubt, Spielberg manages to keep the film moving at a high frequency, largely by focusing on Donovan.

Written by the Coen brothers and Matt Charman, and distributed by Disney and 20th Century Fox, the film has already garnered considerable praise. So has Hanks in this Cold War epic.

There were highlights in each city we visited in China, and I would like to share those with you in this last installment of my trip tagging along on my son’s speaking itinerary. We flew 16 hours to Shanghai, the gateway to that huge country. Someone likened Shanghai to New York and Beijing to Washington, D.C., because the Chinese federal government is in the latter city while the former is thought of as more of a cultural and fun place.

Shanghai is dazzling for its skyscrapers, night-lights akin to Times Square and history, particularly as displayed by its impressive 19th-century architecture along the Bund on the riverfront. The western powers, that forced China open then, built their customs houses and administrative headquarters there, and now those buildings are icons of success because Chinese in corporations and government offices people them. They look out across the Huangpu River on the newest and most luxurious section of the city, Pudong, which was originally swamps and slums but now houses the Shanghai World Financial Center in futuristic high-risers and the Oriental Pearl Radio & TV Tower.

My favorite place in the city is the Shanghai Museum, with its four floors displaying cultural relics and artifacts from more than 5,000 years ago. The architecture of the building itself symbolizes “a round heaven and a square earth.” Most impressive are the bronze items, largely for cooking and wine, that speak to the sophistication of these people thousands of years ago. Inside the museum is a large atrium from which the floors above are visible The collections may represent antiquity but the escalators efficiently carrying visitors from floor to floor convey modernity. And typical of Chinese zeal for business, there is a small gift shop on every floor in addition to the main one at the entrance. Calligraphy, pottery, jade, sculptures and bronze reproductions offer the visitor take-home reproductions of the treasures exhibited in the museum.

Shanghai is also known for a humanitarian action taken between 1933-41. At that time the city welcomed 30,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Europe. Despite orders from the Nazi leaders demanding the refugees be turned over by Japan, their allies who then occupied China, the Jews were not. But Mao expelled all Westerners after his victory in 1949.

Suzhou, a half-hour bullet train ride from Shanghai, is famous for its canals and gardens. An outstanding example we enjoyed was the Humble Administrator’s Garden, a 16th-century gem with small ponds, bridges and secluded pavilions.

Hangzhou, another short train ride from Shanghai in the other direction, was termed by Marco Polo, “the City of Heaven,” and surrounds beautiful West Lake. Every evening on the lake is a sight to behold. Called “Impression West Lake,” it is a water, light and animation show created by Zhang Yimou, who co-directed the 2008 Summer Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. The entire production appears to take place improbably atop the water.

Nanjing, a walled city on the banks of the Yangzi River and in front of Purple Mountain, was next, one-and-a-half hours farther by train. Often the capital of the country through the centuries and the site of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum, the city is also known for the brutality perpetrated by the invading Japanese army in 1937. Up to 400,000 people are thought to have been killed during that time which is still angry subject matter between the two countries. However, that doesn’t prevent China today from using police cars made by Honda.

We then flew a couple of hours northeast to Changchun, which is well off the tourism path. Once the capital of the Japanese–controlled state of Manchukuo, known to those who have seen the 1987 movie, “The Last Emperor,” the city is the center of car production. From here we were driven six hours, over every type of roadway from wide new highway to bumpy and twisting dirt surfaces and through thousands of acres of undeveloped forests, to a spectacular volcanic mountain jutting up against the border with North Korea. Changbaishan has a crater lake in its midst at better than 8,000 feet and is reached via a roller-coaster drive. The circumference of the mountaintop is an easy 9 miles hike, but we were severely warned not to do so lest the neighboring border guards arrest us.

Last stop was Beijing, another airplane ride southwest. There we managed to walk through the three tourist musts: the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. These have been dramatically commercialized since my last visit 10 years earlier, but they still are worthy, as is this most ancient and modern country, of everyone’s bucket list.