From Pablo on a previous thread:
1) "Too many people had to be in on it" (see the Manhattan Project - which kept its secrecy FROM the American people for decades despite 10s of thousands of people working on it 40 hours a week!)
and
2) "Too much risk faking it more than once" (BUT, the very easy and all-encompassing success of the Apollo 11, gave the US super-rich every reason to expect that further "missions" would bring further success while limiting the whole cash-cow program to only one mission would tend to raise increasing doubts, "Why just once???" After all, the FIRST ONE was, by far, the hardest to pull off. After that, it was mostly just "rinse and repeat". But then, as soon as the 2nd one, Apollo 12, people were already getting bored with the unprecedented success rate of Apollo; and started mass complaining about NASA programming interrupting "I Love Lucy" (or whatever was THE TV "thing" of the day). So, along comes Apollo 13; a moment-to-moment "thriller" which re-captured American interest very deeply.
3) As to you "THINKING" you'd bet your actual LIFE on the Apollo Missions being true; I'd be a bit careful if I were you. The whole world once 100% believed that the Sun went around the Earth. Bascially everybody was 100% SURE. I bet if we had polled them back then; they too would have "bet their lives on that belief"; yet 100% of them were wrong.
btw, OUTSIDE OF THE US, the vast majority of the world's people believe that the Apollo Project was a HOAX. (Similarly, outside the US, the vast majority of the world (except Canada as the only exception) believes that Bin Laden did not do 9/11; but that instead, it was an inside job by the US Gov (or elements within it). Proving that Americans are just as easily misled by our government and other peoples usually are by theirs; AND, the "closer to home" the issue, the more the brainwashing is pushed and the more effective it tends to be.