Canadian Envoy Chester Ronning Dies

Chester A. Ronning, son of Lutheran missionaries to China who became a career Canadian diplomat and tried to arrange peace talks between North Vietnam and the United States in 1966, is dead at the age of 90.

Ronning died Monday of pneumonia at the Bethany Auxiliary Hospital nursing home, where he was admitted last May.

Fluent in Mandarin, Ronning served as first secretary to the Canadian Embassy in Chungking, one of many assignments in the Orient.

He was also Canada’s minister to Iceland, ambassador to Norway, high commissioner to India from 1957 to 1964 and a delegate to the United Nations.

Ronning was born Dec. 13, 1894, in central China, where his parents--both Lutheran missionaries--were stationed.

He attended school in Bardo, Canada, and in 1917 received a teacher’s certificate from Camrose Normal School in Alberta Province. In 1922, he graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in education.

Ronning returned to China to teach at a school his father had founded, but was forced to leave during the upheaval at the end of the Great Revolution in 1927. He became president of Camrose Lutheran College that year.

Ronning was a squadron leader in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II and began his diplomatic service in 1942 with the intelligence division of the RCAF in Ottawa.

Ronning officially retired in 1965--but a year later was asked to head a confidential mission to Vietnam to determine the possibility of a negotiated settlement of the war.

He met with North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong that March and returned with Dong’s pledge to begin peace talks if the United States would stop bombing. In June, Ronning secured a counterproposal from the United States to stop bombing if North Vietnam would stop supporting the Viet Cong in the south.

Soon U.S. bombers launched massive attacks on oil storage depots around Hanoi and Haiphong. Ronning said then he was convinced the escalated U.S. bombing “will not break the will of the North.”

Ronning made headlines by accusing the U.S. State Department of “consistently undermining” his peace missions. He said then-President Lyndon B. Johnson approved of his efforts, but Secretary of State Dean Rusk did not.

Two years after Ronning’s unsuccessful mission, Johnson did halt nearly all bombing of North Vietnam, and Hanoi came to the bargaining table.

Ronning told a conference on world affairs in the mid-1960s it was imperative for Canada and other Western nations to recognize China and to support its admission to the United Nations as a prelude to ending the Vietnam War.

Canada and China established diplomatic relations on Oct. 13, 1970--almost nine years before the United States made the same move.