President Obama nominating John Kerry to be next secretary of state

President Obama is poised to nominate Senator John F. Kerry this afternoon to be the country’s next secretary of state, according to Washington officials briefed on the decision.

The announcement was to come after Kerry returned from the National Cathedral in Washington, where he was attending the funeral of former colleague Senator Daniel Inouye.

The White House planned to add the announcement to the president’s schedule, said the officials, who demanded anonymity to preempt the formal announcements.

Obama had been holding Kerry’s nomination in the hope of announcing a team of national security appointments, but continued issues with final nominees for secretary of defense and CIA director prompted him to proceed with Kerry’s solo nomination, said one of the officials.

The path to Kerry’s nomination was cleared last week, when United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice announced that she was withdrawing her name from consideration for secretary of state.

Senate Republicans led by Obama’s 2008 opponent, John McCain of Arizona, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, had declared their opposition to Rice’s possible appointment as the nation’s chief diplomat, saying she had misled them about the reasons for the Sept. 11 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Rice tried to save her nomination but support for Rice in Congress eroded as it built for Kerry.

The Massachusetts Democrat is a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and has been an unofficial administration emissary to world hotspots from the Horn of Africa to Pakistan.

Kerry kept his mouth shut, telling a Globe reporter last Friday as he arrived back in Boston from Washington: “When the time is right, you’ll know what’s going on and so will I.”

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