Originally Posted by Von Poop

In many ways one is no better or worse than the other, any history based purely on operational documents is as open to distortion by the progenitors of those documents, and often also by their very bald nature.

I'd go for a combination of the two, as I'm sure D'estes and Hastings would too. For an 'opinion' of the nature of a man personal recollections from a selection of human beings can give far more insight, particularly as one can place each opinion in it's context.
If all history followed a strict and rather dreary Eltonian 'objectivity' approach it could be very dry history indeed.