The President is being given conflicting advice as to what to do in Cuba (see reading 1). What do you advise?

Things to think about:
--domestic political advisor: what platform did you run on and how might that guide your decision-making? does it matter that this plan was handed to you from an outgoing Republican administration that was not that enthusiastic about the plan? (Eisenhower to CIA covert-ops chief Richard Bissell in summer, 1960: "if you don't intend to go through with this , let's stop talking about it.") Historical precedents are not promising: Historian Arthur Schlesinger to JFK in March: "what do you think of this damned invasion?" JFK: "I think about it as little as possible." When JFK tells Dean Acheson, HST's sec of state, about the plans, Acheson says, "Are you serious?...It doesn't take Price-Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred Cubans aren't as good as twenty-five thousand." (Castro has 32,000 in army, 9000 police, militia of c.300K, 5000 in navy. About 1500 people in the invasion force.)

--Latin-American affairs advisor: read the NY Times article (reading 2), which ran on p.1, where nobody would miss it. Should the fact that this plot is no longer secret--in fact, everybody knows what's coming and when--affect your thinking? The news is definitely out there: parts of the story appear in, in 1960 alone, the Miami Herald, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the LA Times, and the Washington Post. Outside the US, Tass (Soviet state news agency) announces late Oct. that the US buildup in Guatemala is for a Cuban invasion; in November, Cuban intelligence tells the USSR that US is training Cuban exiles; the story also runs in US News in March ("The Big Buildup to Overthrow Castro"); in early April, the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, in a cable intercepted by the CIA, tells the Kremlin the exact date of the invasion. What are the consequences if you go ahead with this? what are they if you don't? Senator J. William Fulbright of Ark., a famous foe of foreign adventurism: "To revert to the Teddy Roosevelt style of intervention in Cuba...would set us back another two generations."

--geopolitical advisor: What has been going on in the past decade in US covert actions, in Iran and Guatemala in particular? are we winning or losing the Cold War? What has the USSR been doing for the past decade in the world, and how does that affect your recommendation?

So...what do you think the President should do? why?

Then read reading 3. The invasion site is supposed to spur a popular uprising, but only thing there, says the CIA project chief, is "alligators and ducks." The only maps you have of the region are from 1895, and they show reefs as clumps of seaweed. On the day of the attack, six unmarked US jets are sent to protect landed forces, but told to do so "without hitting ground targets or seeking combat." (The Pentagon has previously concluded that the landing party can survive up to four days IF it has "complete air superiority.") In light of these new developments, what, if anything, do you advise the President to do now?