President Obama is leaning strongly toward naming
John Kerry,
the Massachusetts senator and unsuccessful Democratic nominee for
president eight years ago, to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as
secretary of state, according to administration officials and friends of
Mr. Kerry.
But the announcement will be delayed, at least until later this week and
maybe beyond, because of the Connecticut school shooting and what one
official called “some discomfort” with the idea of Mr. Obama’s
announcing a national security team in which the top posts are almost
exclusively held by white men.
The American ambassador to the United Nations,
Susan E. Rice,
who is black and was considered Mr. Obama’s leading candidate for the
job, withdrew her name from consideration last week after opposition to
her nomination grew in the Senate.
For Mr. Kerry, 69, the appointment would fulfill an ambition that dates
back many years. He had hoped for the post when Mr. Obama was first
elected in 2008; since then, he has shepherded the passage of a critical
arms-control treaty and conducted a series of quiet missions on behalf
of the president, notably at moments of crisis with Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
But he would be entering an administration whose primary foreign policy
strategies are already set, even as it tries to use American leverage in
dealing with a Middle East that is veering toward hard-line Islamist
governments and an Iran that is getting perilously close to a nuclear
capability.
With Ms. Rice out of the running, Mr. Kerry’s appointment “is the
working presumption,” said a senior State Department official who has
been preparing for the transition to a new secretary. But White House
officials said the deal was not entirely done, because the lineup
currently envisioned — with former Senator Chuck Hagel to head the
Defense Department and the acting
C.I.A.
director, Michael J. Morell, likely to be named to the post permanently
— looks a bit too much like national security teams of a previous era.
For Mr. Obama, a national security team led by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Hagel,
and their longtime colleague in the Senate, Vice President Joseph R.
Biden Jr., would be deeply experienced but also, in many ways, deeply
conventional. All three were in the Senate during the cold war, long
before Mr. Obama came on the political scene. All describe themselves as
pragmatists rather than ideologues, and all became skeptics, then
critics, of the American experiment in Iraq from the early days of the
war.
Still, administration officials said, for now there are no serious
candidates for the State Department job other than Mr. Kerry. He would
be the first white man to serve in the post since Warren Christopher
left the job in early 1997. His successors have been Madeleine K.
Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Kerry’s colleagues in the Senate have said that he would sail
through confirmation hearings. Senator John McCain, Republican of
Arizona, has already begun jokingly calling Mr. Kerry “Mr. Secretary.”
Both men are veterans of the Vietnam War and worked together to provide
President Bill Clinton with political cover to grant diplomatic
recognition to Vietnam. Mr. McCain said of Mr. Kerry recently that he
would most likely win a large number of Republican votes for
confirmation.
The issue of the composition of Mr. Obama’s team arose anew when Ms.
Rice withdrew. If she keeps her current post as ambassador to the United
Nations, she will remain in Mr. Obama’s cabinet and on his national
security team. She is also considered the likely successor to Thomas E.
Donilon as national security adviser. But Mr. Donilon does not intend to
leave that post for a year or two, his friends say, unless he is named
White House chief of staff.
Michèle A. Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense for policy,
remains a candidate to become the first female defense secretary. But in
internal discussions, White House officials have said that the
challenge of the next few years will be working with Congress to shrink
the defense budget and kill some major cold war-era weapons systems. For
that, Mr. Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, is seen as better able to
win votes from his former colleagues.
Ms. Flournoy has also been mentioned as a possible C.I.A. director, but
Mr. Morell, who ran the analysis division of the agency, is the favorite
of C.I.A. officials. “Mike has been concerned about the
over-militarization of the C.I.A.,” a senior military officer who has
dealt with him said recently. “And so are many at the agency, who fear
they have wandered too far from the job of analyzing trends and
obtaining secrets.”
John Brennan, a close aide to Mr. Obama and a former agency station
chief in Saudi Arabia who has directed counterterrorism activity from
his basement White House office, is also a candidate for C.I.A.
director. But officials note that his current post already gives him
sway over all 18 intelligence agencies.
Mr. Kerry has worked hard to deepen his relationship with Mr. Obama. The
president has at times considered him long-winded and a throwback to a
previous generation of diplomats, aides said. But Mr. Kerry impressed
Mr. Obama and Mr. Donilon when he was sent to deal with Hamid Karzai,
the famously unpredictable president of Afghanistan, after Mr. Karzai’s
supporters rigged a presidential election in 2009 and refused a second
round of voting.
Mr. Kerry also visited Pakistan several times to try to ease recurrent
tensions, including a two-week visit after the raid that killed Osama
bin Laden. Pakistani officials tried to get Mr. Kerry to write what they
called a “blood oath” that the United States would never take action to
seize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Mr. Kerry found a diplomatic way out,
saying the United States had no “designs” on Pakistan’s weapons.
“It meant nothing,” a member of Mr. Obama’s national security team said
later. “And it solved the crisis. Quite artfully.”
