It's more funny that both primarily used thousands of Germans as their rocket technicians, and both german parties used their german style, based on engineers as heads.

This all changed with Lyndon Johnson taking over, getting rid of the Germans, introducing the well known inefficient NASA/gov-style management style known from the Shuttle era, and moved the technicians out of Alabama to Houston. This was the anti-modern democratic approach.

SpaceX simply went back to the old modern style, which worked well for the US and Russia.

The trick was not using smart people, but experienced engineers in control, and not fresh anti-engineer PM's out of college. Everybody can control a budget, esp. engineers, but only engineers can control engineering problems.