Clinton tells CBS he never considered resigning, most proud of economic plan

NEW YORK (AP) _ Former President Clinton tells CBS' ``60 Minutes'' that he never considered resigning and is proud he fought efforts to impeach him amid the scandal over his affair with Monica

Thursday, June 17th 2004, 1:33 pm

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ Former President Clinton tells CBS' ``60 Minutes'' that he never considered resigning and is proud he fought efforts to impeach him amid the scandal over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

``I stood up to it and beat it back,'' Clinton says of the impeachment process, which he describes as ``an abuse of power.''

``The whole battle was a badge of honor. I don't see it as a stain, because it was illegitimate.''

The interview, to take up the full hour of Sunday's program, is timed to next week's publication of Clinton's memoir, ``My Life,'' which covers his Arkansas childhood, his tenure as that state's governor as well as his presidency.

Clinton sees the Lewinsky affair as ``a terrible moral error'' whose disclosure to his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, put him ``in the doghouse.''

``I did something for the worst possible reason. Just because I could,'' Clinton says of his infidelity. ``I think that's just about the most morally indefensible reason anybody could have for doing anything.''

On Wednesday, Clinton told an audience of about 1,000 people at a screening of a documentary about his presidency in New York that he became an enemy of right wing America in an attack led by Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr. The film was first shown Tuesday in Little Rock, Ark.

Clinton said Starr was ``the instrument of a grand design.'' The documentary, ``The Hunting of the President,'' portrays Clinton as the target of a political smear campaign. One of the filmmakers, Harry Thomason, is a close friend of Clinton's.

``When the Berlin wall fell, the perpetual right in America, which always needs an enemy, didn't have an enemy any more, so I had to serve as the next best thing,'' Clinton said.

Making only an indirect reference to his affair with Lewinsky after the film's screening, Clinton referred to it as his ``stupid, personal, wrong mistakes.''

In the ``60 Minutes'' interview with CBS News anchor Dan Rather, Clinton said he, his wife and their daughter, Chelsea, dealt with their family crisis through counseling.

``We did it together. We did it individually,'' he says. ``We did family work.''

Clinton pronounces his economic plan as his greatest accomplishment of his eight years in office.

``I kept score, how many people's lives were better off,'' he tells Rather. ``People actually had the ability to do more things than ever before.''

The former commander in chief also takes pride in assembling the coalition that stopped former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on independence-minded ethnic Albanians.

``The day that Kosovar war ended and I knew Milosevic's days were numbered was a great day. I had a lot of great days,'' he says.

Excerpts from the interview, taped Tuesday at Clinton's home in Chappaqua, N.Y., and last weekend in Arkansas, were released Wednesday. The book, published by Alfred A. Knopf, has a first printing of 1.5 million copies.

``The Hunting of the President,'' based on the best-selling book of the same name by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, documents the Whitewater scandal, the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Clinton's subsequent impeachment.