The Apollo Program should be thought of in both civilian and Cold War terms.

As a civilian exercise, discontinuing the Apollo Program would have been grossly inconsistent with the approach that Lyndon Johnson initiated and Richard Nixon continued for the Vietnam War NOT to have any of the conspicuous home front aspects of World War II -- no conversion of civilian production to war production, no rationing, no price controls, no total mobilization, little mobilization of the National Guard, Reserves, or Coast Guard, no war bond drives, no (explicit) war taxes. While the draft is heavily dramatized, the military's manpower expansion to address Vietnam was unprecedently small compared to prior wars. (Most of the units deployed to Vietnam were extant units that would been in various peacetime deployments otherwise, and the Vietnam draft was simply a continuation of the peacetime draft that had been in force 1953 to 1964 to maintain high Cold War manning levels.)

The Apollo Program was also in part an effort to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism over Communism -- and in that was an integral front in the Cold War, for which Vietnam and other counterinsurgencies were other fronts -- all part of the same overall strategy.