New York, June 17 (Reuters): Former President Bill Clinton called his fight against impeachment a “badge of honour” and his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky “morally indefensible” in a CBS television interview.

In the hour-long interview to air on CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday, two days before publication of his memoir, My Life, Clinton said he was proud of his successful fight against impeachment, the network said in excerpts released yesterday. “I didn’t quit, I never thought of resigning and I stood up to it and beat it back,” he said.

“The whole battle was a badge of honour. I don’t see it as a stain, because it (the impeachment process) was illegitimate,” added Clinton,”Clinton’s 957-page memoir, published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Bertelsmann AG’s Random House unit, hits bookstores next Tuesday. He was reportedly paid a $10-million advance for the book.

He told 60 Minutes that high on his list of regrets was his affair with Lewinsky, which he called “a terrible moral error.” Clinton said his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea, were able to overcome the effect of the revelation of the affair through counselling. The former President said his wife, now a Democratic senator from New York, needed time with him to decide whether she would stay married to him.

“We’d take a day a week, and we did — a whole day a week, every week for a year, maybe a little more — and did counselling,” said Clinton. “We did it together. We did it individually. We did family work.”Clinton said there was no rational explanation for his adulterous behaviour. “I did something for the worst possible reason. Just because I could,” the former President said. “I think that’s just about the most morally indefensible reason anybody could have for doing anything.”

Clinton cited the record economic expansion during his eight years in the White House as his greatest domestic achievement. “I kept score, how many people’s lives were better off,” he said, “the fact that we were able to have 22 million (new) jobs and record home ownership and lower interest rates.” He cited the day the war in Kosovo ended as one of the high points of his foreign policy. “The day that Kosovo war ended and I knew (former Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosevic’s days were numbered was a great day,” he said. The inability to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal in his final days in office was a big disappointment, he said.

Yesterday, Clinton attended the premier of The Hunting of the President in New York which claims to expose the 10-year campaign to destroy the former President. The 90-minute film recreates interviews conducted for the bestselling book of the same name.