Abstract
This paper compares political and social histories of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It argues that both perspectives are equally essential in understanding the Bureau’s complexity. By looking at historical sources surrounding the FBI’s Watergate investigation, the paper compares insights emerging from traditional sources of political history such as presidential and Congressional libraries as well as Bureau archives with the social history that emerges from agents’ oral accounts. In analyzing the sources that emerge from both a top-down and bottom-up view of the Bureau, it becomes clear that power is diffuse across the organization and resides not only in such obvious places as that of the director and senior leadership but also in unexpected places like that of a new agent. Juxtaposing the two types of histories shows that, at least sometimes, two very different depictions of the Bureau can emerge regarding a single high-profile case.
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