Leadership Quote by Sargent Shriver

“Do the job first. Worry about the clearance later” is the kind of brisk, morally loaded pragmatism you only get from someone who’s spent years watching government choke on its own safeguards. Shriver isn’t celebrating recklessness; he’s indicting a system where procedure becomes a substitute for purpose. The line works because it flips the usual hierarchy. In Washington-speak, “clearance” is the ritual: approvals, signatures, turf-protecting memos, the bureaucratic choreography that can turn urgency into a slow-motion collapse. Shriver’s command puts outcomes back on top, and it does so with a cadence that sounds like a field instruction, not a policy memo.

The subtext is a theory of public service: the moral obligation to act often arrives before the paperwork catches up. That tension was central to Shriver’s career, especially in the Great Society era when ambitious programs (the Peace Corps, the War on Poverty) were built at speed, under scrutiny, and with constant institutional skepticism. “Clearance” also hints at security-state paranoia and political cover-your-back culture. He’s telling aides: don’t let fear of blame preempt the work.

There’s also a sly recognition of how power operates. Clearance is less about truth than permission; it’s the stamp that converts action into something legible to the machine. Shriver’s line urges a kind of constructive disobedience: build the reality first, then force the system to reconcile itself with results. In politics, that’s not just strategy. It’s a bet that tangible help will out-argue process.