I would be surprised if someone who read much of the relevant history could honestly conclude that bureaucratic imperatives had a bigger distorting role in how the space program progressed than the Cold War did. The Cold War, and the resulting influence on NASA's decisions from the military, was an extremely large factor up through at least the late 1980s. Everything we did in space had one eye looking over at the possibility of space-based weapons, space-based missile defense, space-based surveillance, etc., and it often resulted in surprisingly detailed requirements that a program be done one way or another.
The bureaucracy was, for me, the result ofthe cold war. From a certain point on it bacame a self reinforcing system. While that was just fine during the cold war when money was cheap as long as it helped protect against the sowjets, and developments were less costly it urned into a nightmare when organisation (government AND industry) failed to realize when it was time to change that. Maybe bureaucracy and all that already had to much an impact by then.
NASAs project management wasn't that bad in the beginning, Apollowas pretty successfull, wasn't it? Afterwards it somewhat declined.
Not that the Europeans are any better as of late, Ariane for example is not a landmark of efficiency.
