Marriage is not just a legal binding of two loved ones. In reality, it takes more than two to complete a marriage. Perhaps, it also takes the toils of two great mothers.

Last Saturday marked the wedding of Mark Mezvinsky and Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. For many, the bride may be more known than the groom. However, Mark, too, has a well-known mother, Marjorie Mezvinsky. This day, the spotlight the two strong-willed mothers received seemed as bright as the ones that shined on the bride and groom.

Marjorie Mezvinsky, now mother-in-law of Chelsea Clinton, seemed to be no ordinary mother, as the similar title goes for Hillary Clinton. Marjorie is a five-time Emmy award winner and had been working as a CBS News Foundation Fellow, and also as a television journalist at NBC for over 24 years.

During her years as a broadcast journalist in 1970, a report on Korean orphans seemed to have affected Marjorie’s adoption of Lee Heh, then a 6-year-old South Korean girl, the first-ever foreign child adoption by a single American mother. Four years later, she adopted a 4-year-old Vietnamese girl, and in 1975, married then Congressman Edward Mezvinsky.

Lee Heh Margolies was 15 when she was chosen from hundreds of applicants to join a select group of 101 congressional pages in Washington, D.C. and first appeared on the December issue of People magazine that year. Lee seemed to enjoy her popularity as she appeared on a talk show on the adoption issue, appeared on the “Free to Be You and Me” TV special, and interviewed Chicago’s late Mayor Richard M. Daley for Children’s Express magazine. In interview with People magazine, she said, “I want to become famous.” 

The Melvinskys had two sons together, and later on adopted three more Vietnamese boys. This made 11 children in total for Marjorie, as she had four children through her former marriage.

Aside from her journalistic career and her charity work, her enthusiasm toward politics led to an exceptional relationship with the former U.S. president. In 1992, Marjorie ran for Congress in Pennsylvania and won. During those years, Marjorie received attention for her decision on Bill Clinton’s controversial 1993 budget. Marjorie was not a fan of the bill, but gave a supporting vote after Clinton’s appeal, which cost her re-election bid primarily because she cast the deciding vote for President Clinton’s tax bill, which was unpopular with her constituents.

In Bill Clinton’s 2004 Memoir “My Life,” he noted about Marjorie: “She earned an honored place in history, with a vote she shouldn’t have had to cast.”

Alongside her political achievements, she currently works as a professor at the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania and serves as the founder and chair of Women’s Campaign International, a group that provides advocacy training for women throughout the world.

By Jurie Hwang  (jurie777@heraldcorp.com)