I can't recall any of the U.S. inter-planetary missions of the 60’s and 70’s failing esp. the ones to Mars. I believe the USSR even had their Mars missions succeed but I could be wrong.

There were quite a few failures on both sides. I'll see if I can find a concise list of the missions. In fact, it was so hard to get anything to Mars that engineers concluded there must be a great big space monster out in the vicinity of Mars gobbling up spacecraft, and it had developed quite a taste for Soviet ones. I think Burroughs' book has a cartoon drawn of the alleged monster. The conspiracy theory is that there's something on Mars someone (or something) doesn't want us to see.

It goes right to the fact that you cannot do all three of the "faster, cheaper, better" at the same time

Not if that's how you're designing spaceships. You can only design spaceships faster and/or cheaper. The "better" was supposed to come from the more effective use of resources. But because of the public's stilted reaction to space expenditures it never materialized. Goldin made the mistake of assuming the public would react rationally.