Watch the doc American Moon, you can find it on YouTube. I believe there is a route that can avoid the worst parts of the van Allen radiation belts, but that's not the route the Apollo missions took. They went straight through the bad parts and then back through the same parts. Up until 1969, even months before it, the radiation was a real concern. There was no solution. People started stepping down in the months leading up to the mission. Then suddenly they just quit talking about the belts and pretended it was no longer a problem. Then they staged the moon landing. Whether or not we went with another crew and landed there or not is a different debate.