Roland, whom friends and family sometimes called "Bunny," was educated at Groton School, from which he graduated in 1913, and Yale University (B.A., 1917), where he was a member of Psi Upsilon fraternity.

[3] During World War I he served for 10 months as an inspector with the rank of lieutenant in the United States Army Ordnance Department; stricken with pneumonia and influenza, he was honorably discharged in January 1919.

[1] Harriman was one of the seven directors of the Union Banking Corporation (along with Prescott Sheldon Bush, father of future U.S. president George H. W. Bush), which financed Fritz Thyssen a donor to the Nazi Party and whose assets were seized by the United States government during World War II under the Trading with the Enemy Act and Executive Order No.

[6] With his wife, Harriman established the Irving Sherwood Wright professorship in geriatrics at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, and provided funds for cardiovascular research at the hospital.

After World War II, Harriman joined the American Red Cross as a member of the board of governors in 1947 and helped reorganize it, serving as manager for the organization's North Atlantic area from 1944 to 1946, as vice-president and national annual fund appeal chair in 1949, and was appointed its president by President Truman to succeed General George Marshall in 1950.