NEW YORK, N.Y. – Casey Ribicoff, the wife of the late U.S. Senator and governor of Connecticut, died at her home in Manhattan on Monday, August 22 of lung cancer.  She was 88.
A socialite and philanthropist in her own right, Ribicoff was a New York legend; an elegant woman who moved gracefully through the upper echelons of the city’s high society, sporting her signature bright red lipstick and oversized, circular black framed glasses.

Casey Ribicoff

“She was just a great dame,” said former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw. “She knew everything that was going on in New York. She knew the social gossip, and she had real insights about Manhattan’s politics, economics and culture.”
Inducted into Vanity Fair magazine’s International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1988, she was partial to American designers like James Galanos, Geoffrey Beene, Bill Blass and, in later years, Ralph Rucci.”
Born Lois Ruth Mell in Chicago, Ribicoff was the daughter of a successful businessman. She attended University of Chicago, married and divorced young, and then moved to Miami, where she married the architect A. Herbert Mathes, and became active in civic affairs.
She met Abe Ribicoff in 1962 when he served as President Kennedy’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. At the time, he was preparing for the first of his three Senate runs.
The two kept in touch and began a romantic relationship after the death of Ribicoff’s first wife, Ruth.  According to the New York Times, in an attempt to keep their relationship under wraps, Ribicoff would use the code name “Dr. Casey” – after the then popular TV series “Ben Casey” – when leaving messages for her future husband at his office. Abe Ribicoff continued to call his wife “Casey” after they married in 1972.

The Ribicoffs  moved to Manhattan after the Senator decided not to run for a fourth term.  According to the New York Times, it wasn’t long before Casey Ribicoff “emerged as a social leader, with a high-powered coterie of intimates that included Nancy Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Annette de la Renta, Dominick Dunne and [Bill]] Blass.
In 1963, she became the first woman elected to the board of trustees of Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.  She sat on the board of the Kennedy Center and WNET for 20 years, and was one of the founders of the AIDS Care Center at New York-Presbyterian Hostpial.
In addition to her son, Peter, of Los Angeles, she is survived by a sister, June Herbert of Indianapolis, and three grandchildren.
“She was up on everything,” said the biographer A. Scott Berg. “Not just the news but every play or film or book, which she’d either seen or read or knew the director or the author. You didn’t hold the attention of people like Henry Kissinger, Felix Rohatyn and Henry Grunwald just because you were decorative.”