However, the shuttle design (which placed the crew compartment right next to the giant explodey bit, to use the technical term) was also inherently much less safe than the rockets that preceded it. (That it was chosen anyway was due in part to the degradation of the safety culture in favour of other goals.)
It's really, really hard to keep an entire organisation laser-focused on safety when they haven't seen an accident in nearly a generation.
Source: Anecdotes from an old friend who is a quality assurance engineer. He was one of the boys on the ground in Huston that brought the Apollo 13 crew home.
Not in the paper, but from my own memory, the launch was high profile due to the first civilian on a NASA mission and was repeatedly delayed by the time they launched. In fact my family had tickets to the launch, and we ended up getting various tours of the space center instead since they kept on delaying.
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Also, my understanding is that Kranz's hard-line began after the Apollo 1 tragedy. Was your friend there early enough to comment on that?
People feel that there's a difference if a test-pilot dies in an uncontrollably dangerous environment for a cause than if a civilian dies because middle-management were too cheap.
But the time of the shuttle, NASA had moved from a prestigious project to pork barrel politics. End result was that managers and politicians were endlessly overruling the engineers.