William Waldorf Astor was the cousin of Titanic victim John Jacob Astor IV, but he deserves attention for several reasons:
1) He was a business partner of J.J.'s -- they built the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York together.
2) He owned the Pall Mall Magazine and Pall Mall Gazette in London, publications that once employed journalist William T. Stead (another Titanic victim) as their editor.
3) While William T. Stead worked as editor at the Pall Mall Gazette in London, he made the acquaintance of another important person on Mr. Astor's payroll: Alfred Milner, later Lord Milner, the founder of the 1909 Roundtable movement, a powerful group of men identified by many writers as the "invisible government" that secretly runs the governments of Britain and the United States. Lord Milner's group certainly founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs, an influential think tank in London, and the Council of Foreign Relations in the United States, a group of ministers who seem to set the foreign policy for both countries without ever having been elected to do so.
4) William Waldorf Astor was an Egyptian rite mason of high degree, and his stories on the subject of Egypt (published in the Pall Mall Magazine), when combined with his clear record of collecting Egyptian antiquities, help to explain why John Jacob Astor IV and his newly wed wife, Madeleine, chose to go to Egypt for their honeymoon. The spring equinox rituals of Isis play an important role in the beliefs of Egyptian rite masons.
5) During the 1920s and the 1930s, William Astor's English mansion, Cliveden, later became the home base of what was known as the Cliveden Set, a group of extremely wealthy and extremely conservative British nationalists who supported Hitler and the rise of fascism in Europe. For the British, they are still a source of much embarrassment and argument: It seems their political powerbase never really went away. British researchers hark back to them for much the same reason that American historians explore President Bush's family history. The political constellations of 1912 help to explain and clarify much of what is going on today.
Sources:
Wikipedia: "William Waldorf Astor"
Wikipedia: "Alfred Milner, 1s Viscount Milner"
Wikipedia: "Cliveden Set"
