Just as youth is not always wasted on the young, wealth is not necessarily squandered on the rich.
Case in point: John Pell Coster Train, writer-editor, financier, philanthropist, and stalwart Cold Warrior, who died last month at a hospital near his summer residence in Maine at age 94. His was a life well lived, with urbanity and insouciance, mixing serious business and enterprising statecraft with great good humor and sound judgment. Train was not exactly the last of his kind, but he was very much a relic of the old WASP ascendancy who adapted and thrived in our anxious epoch, combining serious success with serious fun.
Born into a silk-stocking New York family, Train’s father was a Manhattan lawyer who wrote a series of popular short stories about an enterprising Manhattan lawyer. His mother was a painter. Sen. Claiborne Pell, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Russell Train, Richard Nixon’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, were cousins.
Educated at Groton and Harvard, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon and earned a graduate degree in comparative literature, Train turned up in Paris in the early 1950s where, in the company of his Lampoon colleague George Plimpton and assorted Ivy League writers-in-exile, he co-founded the Paris Review (still going strong nearly 70 years later) and served as its first managing editor. It was he who gave the fledgling quarterly its name, steering it firmly in the direction of art and literature and away from politics.
For Train, however, literary journalism was an avocation, not his life’s work. In the mid-1950s, he was an Army officer, serving on the Pentagon staff and brushing up against the world of intelligence and foreign policy, making connections and cultivating contacts in Washington that would serve him well as a dollar-a-year man in various agencies in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations — and would preoccupy conspiracy theorists in the years to come.
After leaving the Army, he went to work for a Wall Street mutual fund and, a few years later, founded his own financial management firm (now called Train, Babcock Advisors). This, in turn, allowed him to purchase Chateau Malescasse, a winery in France’s Gironde region. Train was the longtime chairman of the Montrose Group, a tax-and-investment advisory firm, and director of a mutual fund specializing in emerging markets.
Prospering in Wall Street also enabled Train to merge two strains in his protean nature: producing bestselling books on wealth management and famous investors — The Midas Touch, about his friend Warren Buffett, The Craft of Investing, Money Masters of Our Time (Buffett again, along with eight others), and Dance of the Money Bees — as well as a series of volumes on a variety of passions, including The Olive: Tree of Civilization, The Orange: Golden Joy, Comfort Me With Apples, and books on the symbolism in the design of Oriental rugs and “remarkable occurrences” in history.
Best of all, he was also the compiler of Remarkable Names of Real People (1977), the culmination of a lifelong delight in oddball monikers that began with his discovery, as a Harvard undergraduate, of an individual named Katz Meow.
Train’s industrious pleasure in the human condition didn’t blind him to the darker precincts of the human universe. Prompted by the example of his friend and sometime colleague Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he was founding chairman of a foundation that awards an annual Civil Courage Prize “for steadfast resistance to evil at great personal cost.” And during the 1980s, he established the Afghanistan Relief Committee, which provided humanitarian aid to civilian refugees and assistance to the mujahedeen warriors resisting the Russian invasion.
His genius for friendship was matched by a gift for attracting dubious enemies. The Institute for Policy Studies was persuaded that Train’s work at the Paris Review and in Afghanistan were covers for advancing the interests of the CIA and U.S. policy, and Lyndon LaRouche came to believe that Train, along with Queen Elizabeth II, was part of a secret cabal to “get LaRouche.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
