John Train (investment advisor)

John Train (born 1928) is an American investment advisor and author. He attended Groton School and Harvard University (B.A. and M.A.), where he was head of the Lampoon and the Signet Society. In 1953, he co-founded and became the first managing editor of The Paris Review, which won attention by publishing extended interviews with such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder and William Faulkner.

After serving in the U.S. Army and working in Wall Street, he founded the New York investment counsel firm now known as Train, Babcock Advisors. During this period he became the principal owner of Chateaux Malescasse, a Cru Bourgeois wine producer. He is chairman of the Montrose Group, investment advisors and tax accountants, and is a director of a major emerging markets mutual fund. He is the founder-chairman of the Train Foundation, which since 2000 has annually awarded the Civil Courage Prize for "steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk." The Prize was inspired by the career of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, with whom Train once worked closely. Asked whether he would prefer to receive the prize, or have it named after him, or be a judge, Solzhenitsyn chose the latter, which he did to the end of his life. The trustees and directors of the Civil Courage Prize include five ambassadors: American, English and South African. He is an overseer of the Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University (affiliated with the United Nations), and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute of Strategic Studies (London).

Train received part-time appointments from Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton as a director of government agencies and entities dealing with Africa, Asia, and Central Europe respectively.

Train has two decorations from the Italian government for humanitarian work, and is an officer of the (British) Order of St. John. In 1980, he helped to establish the Afghanistan Relief Committee to provide medicine and food to the victims of the Soviet invasion, serving first as its treasurer and later as president. The ARC merged with the International Rescue Committee, whose board he joined. He was an original trustee of the American University in Bulgaria.

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