Gary Condit had just returned from watching his two grandsons take part in a taekwondo demonstration on May 6 when his wife told him that Dr. Robert Levy had called to say that his daughter Chandra was missing. Initially, says Condit, he battled a feeling of horror, "hoping that she'd just gone somewhere." But when he got Dr. Levy on the phone, there was no escaping the panic in the distraught father's voice. "Just the tone of his voice sent chills running down my spine," says the congressman from Ceres, Calif. "It made me really fearful that something might have happened to her."

Last week Condit broke a four-month silence to address the swirl of questions set off by the mysterious disappearance on May 1 of former Washington intern Chandra Levy, 24, and the subsequent barrage of reports that linked Condit romantically to Levy and suggested that he impeded the ongoing investigation into her whereabouts.

Condit, 53, at a private home in Beverly Hills, was alternately cool and nervous, stony and impassioned during his 90-minute interview with PEOPLE -- his first magazine interview since Levy's disappearance. He spoke in a monotone and often wrung his hands and shot anxious looks at his grown daughter as he spoke about Levy, his marriage and his future. (His wife, Carolyn, 53, attended a photo shoot and then excused herself from the interview.)

Often parsimonious with his responses, Condit left a trail of unanswered questions, particularly on the subject of Chandra, whom he called "a good friend." Police sources have said that Condit acknowledged he had an affair with the intern, but this week he repeatedly refused to answer questions about the nature of the relationship. "In the interest of my family and the Levy family," he says, "I am not going to discuss my relationship." He said neither his staff nor his children, Chad, 34, and Cadee, 25, both of whom work as aides to California Gov. Gray Davis, knew about his close friendship with Chandra. He would not comment about what his wife might have known.