Content Warning: The source text contains discussions of suicide, mental illness, sexual assault, racist violence, and anti-gay bias.

The book begins by examining J. Edgar Hoover’s family background in Washington, DC, which was a fairly small city throughout the 19th century. The first Hoovers arrived shortly after the city’s burning during the War of 1812 and participated in its early rebuilding efforts. Several Hoovers owned slaves before the Civil War. Hoover’s grandfather John Thomas joined the Coast Survey, an early office in a then-tiny federal bureaucracy, but one that took pride in its dedication to science and professionalism without partisan biases. Hoover’s mother, Annie, descended from Hans Hinz, the first Swiss consul general to the United States, and her uncle set up the German-American Bank. She grew up wealthy, but then the bank collapsed in 1878, and her father later drowned himself in the Anacostia River. Around this time, Annie met Dickerson Hoover, while he was reeling from the loss of his own father at a relatively young age. Their shared struggle seemed to bind them together, even as the family suffered a terrible loss when their third child, Sadie, died of diphtheria at the age of three. Born 17 months after her death, John Edgar carried the weight of family history from his first moments.