The Grinnell 14 Take On the Bomb (feat. Peter Coyote)
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
November 16, 1961. Fourteen college students from Iowa have driven nearly a thousand miles to the White House. They’re fasting, protesting, and calling for an end to nuclear bomb testing. These students, later known as the Grinnell 14, will help ignite the student peace movement of the 1960s.
Actor Peter Coyote (then Peter Cohon) was one of them. He joins us to remember how it felt to grow up under the shadow of the bomb, why they believed Kennedy’s “peace race” could change the world, and what happened when they found themselves face-to-face with the White House.
Special thanks to Peter Coyote. He requested we credit him as a “good person,” which we agree with.
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Cover art: Peter Cohon protesting in front of the White House on Nov. 16, 1961, AP Photo/Harvey Georges
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:04.2 | History this week. |
| 0:06.2 | November 16th, 1961. |
| 0:10.4 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:13.7 | It's early in Washington, D.C., 7.30 a.m., to be exact. |
| 0:19.3 | Two beat-up cars pull up to the curb at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, |
| 0:23.6 | the White House. Fourteen college students have driven a long way, almost 1,000 miles. |
| 0:33.6 | They all grew up in the atomic age. |
| 0:38.3 | Hiding under their desks as young kids for duck-and-cover drills. |
| 0:43.3 | The fear of the bomb has cast a shadow over almost their entire lives. |
| 0:50.3 | But just a few weeks earlier, there started to be some new hope that things could change. |
| 1:00.4 | That's why the students are here. |
| 1:03.0 | They unpack the signs that they made the night before. |
| 1:05.9 | No more nuclear testing. |
| 1:08.0 | We support Kennedy's peace race. |
| 1:10.5 | Those were the two messages, basically. |
| 1:14.6 | We spoke with Peter Coyote, one of the protesters who was there. |
| 1:18.9 | He was 20 back then, and going by his given name, Peter Cohen. |
| 1:23.1 | He's now an actor, perhaps best known as the narrator of Ken Burns' documentaries. |
| 1:29.8 | And he grew up under the fear of the bomb. |
| 1:34.6 | The best quote on it is a quote by Bob Dylan, where he said that the first nuclear |
| 1:41.5 | explosion made random annihilation a fact. |
... |
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