Movie Attacking North Korean Tyrant Was Big Mistake, Says Former Sony Executive

North Korea hacked into the computers of a Hollywood studio in 2014, and the company's former executive now blames himself—or his own childhood—for okaying a movie that angered the dictator in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un.

"Curiously, I never really got angry at the North Koreans, on the assumption that if you kick the hornet's nest and get stung, you can't really blame the hornets," the former CEO of Sony Entertainment, Michael Lynton, writes in an excerpt that appeared in the Wall Street Journal of his new book, From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You.

In the book excerpt, Lynton depicts then-President Barack Obama as critical of Sony's decision to make the movie. "I spoke to President Obama about the whole incident. Unsurprisingly, he asked the right question: 'What were you thinking when you made killing the leader of a hostile foreign nation a plot point? Of course that was a mistake.'"

The movie, The Interview, a Seth Rogen and James Franco vehicle, depicts journalists recruited by the CIA to assassinate the communist autocrat. It was eventually released in 2014, mostly on streaming via Stripe and Google, after the attacks threatened violence against theaters that screened the film.

In the attack itself, the North Korean hackers dumped thousands of private emails, including Lynton's, as well as employee social security numbers, salaries, and unreleased films.

In public, Obama took a different stance than the one Lynton attributes to him privately. Obama said at a Dec. 19, 2014, news conference, "We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don't like or news reports that they don't like. Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don't want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. So that's not who we are. That's not what America is about. … Do not get into a pattern in which you're intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks."

Others serving in the Obama administration at the time confirmed the blame-Sony attitude described by, and ultimately internalized by, Lynton. Richard Stengel, a former managing editor of Time who served in the Obama administration as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, recounted in a Vanity Fair excerpt from his own book that "the collective reaction by everyone at the State Department was a yawn. Responses ranged from, It's not our problem, to Sony was stupid to use Kim's actual name, to What do you expect when you insult a head of state and threaten another country?"

In the Journal excerpt, Lynton partially blames his own upbringing for his decision to greenlight the movie. "When I was 9, my parents moved from Scarsdale, N.Y., to Wassenaar, Holland. I did not speak the language and felt desperate to make friends," he explains. He "never got invited to parties." In approving the movie, "my middle-school self took over."

Commenters on the Journal website ridiculed the Lynton book excerpt. One Journal reader, Donald Feldman, wrote, "It was a great movie and the right decision to release it. Lynton's orgy of self-blame is pathetic. No one could have anticipated that N Korea could have hacked the information that they did. Lynton's conclusion seems to be that appeasement is always the right decision when confronted by a grotesque bully." That was the most-liked comment of all 401 on the Journal website.

Another popular comment was from Aaron Sawchuk: "Are you kidding me? The lesson you learned was to self-censor against a brutally repressive regime? Truly a profile in courage. Pathetic."

What's the point of having America control Hollywood if we can't make a movie mocking a communist dictator?

Lynton did not respond by deadline to a request for comment sent via the book's publisher. Lynton and his coauthor, Joshua L. Steiner, who was chief of staff to then-Treasury secretary Lloyd Bentsen during the Clinton administration, are scheduled to appear March 11 at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.

The actual book is even worse than the Journal excerpt. In addition to Lynton's story about how his big mistake was getting North Korea angry, there's a chapter by Steiner, who was in the news during the Clinton administration for keeping a diary and writing in it about aspects of the Whitewater scandal, which related to a real estate investment made by Bill and Hillary Clinton. The rest of the book is interviews with other people (including author Malcolm Gladwell and former New York Times executive editor Max Frankel's son David Frankel, who is a movie director) about their "mistakes," which are mostly minor career miscues.

Lynton, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, is a former member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, one of the university's two governing boards. He was also a member of Harvard's Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. Joshua Steiner's father, Dan Steiner, was Harvard's general counsel from 1970 to 1992, and Joshua Steiner now serves on Yale's Board of Trustees.

Steiner writes that he regrets "having tried too hard to mitigate the diary's damage by hedging and modifying, explaining and interpolating what I had written."

"In an effort to protect my colleagues, and to ameliorate their unhappiness with me, I drew additional attention to what I had written," Steiner goes on. "I tried to recharacterize what I had written or add additional context around it. I said that what I wrote wasn't meant as a verbatim account, that I had jotted down my impressions. All those explanations understandably sounded as if I were disowning what I myself had written. Something about my personality made me too eager to please my colleagues, too concerned about their reactions."

Steiner writes, "I should have followed that old adage: 'Never complain, never explain.'"

He and Lynton should have followed that wisdom, too, before compounding their mistakes by publishing this book.

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