There's a lot of blame that (deservedly) gets pinned on the NASA administrators, but this fails to ask the really important question -- what sort of political and other pressures were put on the administrators such that they felt compelled to make shit up?

Seems like it was politically impossible for NASA to say outright that there was a 1% chance of failure for every launch -- it would have led to loss of public support for the Shuttle program. So we have a systems failure where both politicians and the public contributed by making NASA admins feel compelled to lie and cover up to make the launches work.

I mean, the courageous thing to do would be to stand up and say space travel is inherently risky, people might die, but it's still worth it. But courageous politicians regularly get voted out of office, and I would bet a courageous NASA admin who said that would end up fired.