Former President Bill Clinton regards battling his Republican-inspired impeachment as “a badge of honor” and the economic boom of the 1990s as his greatest achievement. But he calls his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky “a terrible moral error.”

Clinton made the remarks in an interview with CBS-TV. Rather, the opening bell in an extended multimedia promotional tour for the former president’s memoirs, My Life.

“The whole battle was a badge of honor,” Clinton said discussing the December 19, 1998, impeachment. “I don’t see it as a stain, because it was illegitimate.” He called it “an abuse of power” by House Republicans and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

The nation’s 42nd president, who now speaks frequently and directs two foundations aimed at global health and economic development projects, called his economic achievements including a balanced federal budget and the longest period of economic growth in the nation’s history as the greatest accomplishments of his presidency.

My Life, published by Knopf, costs $35 and hit book stores on Tuesday. A 957-page tome, for which Bill Clinton was paid a $12 million advance, breaks into two parts: one chronicling his hardscrabble childhood in rural Arkansas to his election as president in 1992, and the second covering his White House years and the Sexgate scandal.