Naval Reserve Force prior to America's entry to the First World War, he was called to active duty on April 7, 1917, and was later promoted to Lieutenant.

Two years later, The Washington Post Company purchased a controlling stake (59%) of Newsweek magazine from the Vincent Astor Foundation for $8 million.

He was 20 when his father died in the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic and, having inherited a massive fortune, he dropped out of Harvard University.

He set out to change the family's image from that of miserly, aloof slum landlords who enjoyed the good life at the expense of others.

In 1963, Homer Staley, a retired businessman in the area, asked Brooke Astor to preserve the remaining natural acreage of woodlands from development.

[12] Sinclair claimed this was what he considered a scientific demonstration of bias of the media in favor of the wealthy because they gave Astor complete coverage, often on the front page, and, except for the Call, they declined to publish his first letter, and only three of the traditional newspapers published a small portion of his reply to Astor's letter, without featuring it as prominently.

[14] At the ceremony, he was stricken with the mumps, a disease that made him sterile; as for the bride, her friend Glenway Wescott, the novelist, admiringly described her in his unpublished diaries as "a grand, old-fashioned lesbian.

[16] On October 8, 1953, several weeks after divorcing his second wife, Astor married the once-divorced, once-widowed Roberta Brooke Russell.

He was called to active duty as part of the New York Naval Militia in February 1917 by order of Governor Charles S. Whitman to help guard bridges and aqueducts against possible German sabotage.

[18] Following the declaration of war against Germany, Astor took advice from his friend and future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and volunteered for active duty with the Navy on April 7, 1917.

He was joined in France by his wife, who did charity work with the YMCA at the naval base in Bordeaux, while he served as Port Officer at Royan.

In the quiet before the war, Astor sailed the Nourmahal in 1938 to Japan on a secret civilian mission for President Franklin D. Roosevelt to gather intelligence on the Japanese naval operations around the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

In this position he coordinated merchant convoys leaving the city and provided informal intelligence work for President Roosevelt.

Perhaps Astor's longer lasting contributions were his weekly reports from the Chase Bank, where his inside access included USSR account balances.

On December 13, 1940, Astor began reporting to the US Treasury the Soviet weekly balances in an unbroken sequence (made by occasional substitutes) up through at least 1945.

His half-brother John Jacob Astor VI, known as "Jakey", felt cheated and resentfully stated that Vincent "had the legal, not the moral right to keep all the money".

He was certain that Vincent was "mentally incompetent" when signing his last will in June 1958 due to frequent smoking and alcoholism, although Brooke insisted otherwise.

Rising to a height of 3,710 m, Mount Astor is located in the Hays Mountains of the Queen Maud Range, and was named by Rear Admiral Richard Byrd on his November 1929 expedition flight to the South Pole.